Undoctrinate Yourself - #11 - Matt Tolstoy

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Dr. Matt Tolstoy, DACM LAc is a physical rehabilitation clinician that specializes in the treatment of chronic pain and post-traumatic stress. He combines physical rehabilitation with a relational therapeutic approach for those dealing with pain and overwhelm, helping them safely find a sense of embodiment and enlivenment.⁠Matt's Website⁠: www.matthewtolstoy.comFind Matt on Instagram @matttolstoy⁠Support the podcast by becoming a patron: https://www.patreon.com/UndoctrinateYourselfPodcastFollow the podcast on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@undoctrinateyourselfpod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow Dr. Alexis on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@dralexisjazmyn⁠⁠Dr. Alexis's Wesbite: www.dralexisjazmyn.com

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Undoctrinate Yourself podcast. This week, I have an amazing guest for you, a good friend of mine, Dr. Matt Tolstoy. He is a physical rehabilitation clinician and an acupuncturist, and I'm super excited to dive deep with him today. We have a lot of interesting topics to cover related to human movement, somatic experiencing acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, and more. So, first of all, welcome Matt. Yeah, it's so good to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure. And it's, it's a pleasure. And it's, been a long time coming to and we've been actually I've been seeing more of you lately than ever,

which is great because I've been able to see you in action for the first time two weeks in a row. And it's really exciting to explore acupuncture because I've never personally had acupuncture and it's been great to see you kind of in action doing your thing and you have such great like bedside manner and like clinical expertise and therapeutic relationships with your patients that it's like really a pleasure to see. So do you want to just tell us a little bit about what kind of work you do with clients and patients, so we can kind of take it from there? Yeah, sure, for her. So like you said, you know, I work with people mostly in the physical rehabilitation world, but then also as a somatic experiencing practitioner and, you know, we'll talk

about what that is. You know, it's a body-oriented therapy for trauma, mostly for trauma and stress-related conditions. And so a lot of what I do is like bring the world of like physical and neurological rehab and sort of relational work via that body-oriented trauma therapy together for people who are typically struggling with, yeah, chronic pain, overwhelm if the source of their chronic pain was an event or an incident or as a result of some sort of personal trauma that they've experienced or even just something like chronic pain, working with somebody who has chronic pain who has a trauma history is just different oftentimes than somebody who doesn't. And the way somebody's nervous system responds to treatment with that in their history versus not,

it's just something that sometimes needs to be considered. And so that's kind of where I live in the rehab space. I absolutely love that because I feel like it's really filling a hole that's not being catered to within the Western medical approach, the standard approach. There's just such a kind of like a conveyor belt of like just very non-personalized medicine that's going on. And so having practitioners like you available is so important for dealing with people who may be having issues that are very personal, like a trauma-based illness, for example. And I mean, I think as, you know, the research kind of expands in this area and practitioners like you are like really flourishing, we're really starting to see how much trauma and like nervous system regulation plays a role in the ideology of so many different diseases. And it's not just like the overt stress and like psychological issues, but also the physical body as well, which obviously ties. in with like the somatic experiencing aspect of what you're doing too.

Yeah, exactly. And that point leads right into like, okay, nobody knows what somatic experiencing is. Or at least it's gaining traction, but it's not something that everybody has context for. And so when we say a body-oriented therapeutic approach, what we mean is that it's different from whether that's classic psychoanalysis or cognitive behavioral therapy, which are much more what we call like top-down focused, like top, meaning like your brain, your thoughts, your cognition, your perception, and then we use that as the primary access point for the therapeutic intervention. Whereas with somatic experiencing, we look at how the body has these just like primordial responses to stress and threat that happen outside of and I'm going to say like next to your awareness, but there are a lot of things that are. body is just due when we are under a certain amount of threat, whether that be acutely in one

moment, like when you think of like a shock trauma event, like an accident or a fall or an attack or something. But then also just the same way, you know, this is like Bob Zabalski's book, you know, why zebras don't get ulcers, you know, like in the modern world, when we get that email we don't want to get or have that conversation with the coworker or our spouse that we really don't want to have, there are physiological things that just happen inside of us because our nervous system evolved off of these, you know, lower brain regions that were designed by survival, you know, that then we apply to the modern world, we apply to the sort of everyday

stressors that we experience that show up as muscle tone or show up as a change in heart rate or show up in a change in breathing rate. And what a body-oriented therapy does is seek to address what's happening on that level, as well as the accompanying thoughts, emotions, top-down processing that way. We start bottom up and come through the way that your body is experiencing and surviving and dealing and managing with the stressful experiences that it encounters. Yeah, I love that. That's such a powerful approach.

I really want to hear about how you kind of came to this work and what came first, like the acupuncture, the somatic experiencing, how they kind of, because it makes sense that they would kind of weave into each other. And like you're picking up all these different tools along the way that you're going to, I'm sure, share with us about. but I would love to hear a little bit about how you kind of got into this line of work to begin with. Was it like a personal experience or like a personal need for like initiating a healing journey or were you just inspired by, you know, other people in your life who were going through issues? Like, can you share with us about that?

Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, in the beginning of my career, I worked in fitness. I was a personal trainer when I first moved to New York. And very rapidly inside of that experience, I just became very inspired by, working with people in pain, you know, and helping them with lifestyle interventions, whether that be movement rehabilitation, changes to diet, changes to lifestyle, and seeing how that could really powerfully change people's experience of their symptoms. And so within a short order of time, I kind of realize like, oh, this is, I really kind of want to work on the

clinical side of this. And so I had spent a decent amount of time like mentally fencing with myself about, okay, what am I going to go back to school and get a license? And am I going to do the traditional PT thing? Am I going to do something different? And ultimately, how I ended up going back to acupuncture school was it did, I was very inspired by the way traditional Chinese medicine saw layers of the human and layers of the human's response to a problem or a pattern, like how we can hear somebody's problem reflected in like the way they use their voice in addition to their symptoms, in addition to the way they hold their posture and their body and the choices they make around, you know, food. What substances do they gravitate towards to regulate themselves?

Do they need to speed themselves up or do they need to slow themselves down? And like looking at the whole picture of somebody to try to understand, like how is this system trying to adapt? around the stressors it's facing. And where is it successful and where is it not so successful, where there's just like a lot of collateral damage and maybe that's what's causing their chronic pain or their chronic symptoms. And so since traditional Chinese medicine has had that appreciation baked into the platform, and I knew that I kind of wanted to work in a realm that straddled the physical medicine realm as well as the psychological approach, that sort of was the thing that attracted to me about deciding to go back to school to get my licensure and acupuncture

compared to some of the other pathways that were available at the time. Amazing. And where did you end up choosing to study and like how did you decide that? Because I'm sure there's lots of options. Yeah. So I mean, I was in New York City. I was in New York and there was a school ironically called Pacific College of Health and Sciences. It's because their first campus was in San Diego. So yeah, so I went to school in New York and, you know, got licensed and everything. I spent a little bit of time in China. after I graduated, working over there in a hospital, which was a great experience and really, you know, sort of blew the lid off of what I thought about acupuncture and how it works and

what all of that was. We can get to that in a minute. And then, yeah, came back and, you know, got my license here and then I've been working in New York ever since. Yeah, amazing. I remember hearing that you were in China for a period of time. I would love to hear about your experience there. And like you alluded to, it kind of illuminated some of maybe like the under belly of the system to a certain extent. I think, I mean, as we're going to talk about this, like all systems have their shortcomings and everything is a tool and it's not, it doesn't mean throw the whole system out, baby with bathwater situation. But can you share with us about what that was like for you and how like eye-opening it was? Yeah. My journey with acupuncture has been,

has been a long one. And there's been times of it that have been very hard and, and painful for me to sort of like personally reconcile. Um, what I see, what was taught to me, what different people say about how acupuncture works or doesn't work, and also like, let's say, the clinical evidence and just like all the things that are in the space about acupuncture and how it's practiced in the West, how we talk about it in the West as primarily white practitioners versus what Chinese practitioners are saying about it now. and there's sort of like posture in relationship to the traditional Chinese medicine component. There's a lot of complexity.

And I think as I went through my school program, there was kind of a little bit of a, I'm sure, you know, many, many, many people, regardless of your clinical training, always have this sort of disillusionment cycle, right? Like you go and you're like, I'm going to help people and it's great. And this thing that I love that I've chosen is so perfect and beautiful. and that's true. And there's also a lot of limitations and there's things that you see that make you go like,

oh, I don't know if I like that. I don't know if I like that. And so I had gone through the program and there were just things that I saw that changed the way that I thought about the sort of rigid structure of traditional Chinese medicine as it's taught in the U.S. where I would watch practitioners in clinic

as a part of my training, do like wildly different things from a theoretical standpoint in traditional Chinese medicine, like address problems in like a very, very, very wide variety of ways and seem to get sort of like a similar level of results. And, you know, it's like how do I reconcile that? You know, like what maybe there's a mechanism that's a layer deeper than what's happening right here that we're calling all these other names, but maybe there's something underneath that unifies why person A who's doing something very particular is getting similar results to person Z who's doing something like almost unrecognizable compared to person A and like how do you how do we what's happening here like what's happening here and then when I went to China the the doctor that I worked

primarily under um you know I had this thought I'm going to China and I'm like all right my like faith is going to be restored I'm like going to the motherland you know I'm learning Chinese like we're going to the source and I'm going to be like set straight and and really get it and really go for it. And then within like four seconds of showing up and meeting this doctor who I've been paired with who is such a lovely, wonderful, warm, hopeful, optimistic person just said right in the middle. He's like, yeah, I don't really believe in the traditional model anymore. He's like, you know, I've been doing this for like 35 years. I see results. I'm not quite sure why.

I don't see results. I'm not quite sure why. And so I think that there's like a deeper mechanism inside of the nervous system and the brain that traditional Chinese medicine acts as like a like a metaphor for but I think that there's I think that there's something something deeper in here that could maybe help us get results more reproducibly and more quickly and the second that he said that it was just this like last like oh inside of me where I felt like he just so succinctly spoke my spoke my doubts and my concerns and like where I was in my experience and to have this guy who spent the last like 30,

35 years in China practicing and really going after it say like, yeah, I'm kind of, I kind of feel the same way. It kind of like gave me this permission to finally, I don't know, release into that and just accept that that's how I felt and wasn't like working so hard to be like, no, the dream is real the way that I imagined it initially. It's like it let me sort of let go of those expectations and let go of my initial conceptualization of it and not feel so not feel so like ashamed of my doubt because I think, you know, especially in the West here in school, not a lot of people were asking the questions like, how is this really weird? Because I like, no, no, no.

It was like it was very, very, very. Yeah, there was a lot of things that like if you expressed any doubt or asked any sort of like critical thinking skills, like, well, you just said that and you did this, I don't really see how they line up, there is a lot of prickliness that you'd encounter and just be like, well, you just maybe you just don't get it enough. Like you're not like in the mess. You know, like they'll like pass it off a certain way to be like, well, maybe you're just not meant for this because if you did, you would get it, you know, rather than engage with some of these existential questions. And so then to go to China and have a bunch of people say to me like,

no, I think that there's absolutely an existential problem here. And we think of it kind of a little bit like this now was a great relief. So validating. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it can feel very isolating if you're like, am I the only one asking these questions? And I mean, I can honestly say I have the same perspective about like my time at Princeton. And like obviously like as well, I've talked about some of the podcast at nauseam.

But like just the Western medical approach has bailed me so many times personally that it's like this is clearly not always the answer. Like we have to be open to questioning the authority questioning the model and like being willing to like, you know, develop. up it and like continue growing upon it because the moment we're just like falling into dogma around it is like the moment that it stops evolving. And so ultimately it's doing a disservice to the people who it's supposed to be helping. And then also we have to like literally gaslight ourselves and just trying to stay in this confined like dogma, this model that's not really where it could be if we were just being open to like critically thinking about it. So I think that's so important. And obviously the name of the podcast is indoctrinate yourself. So I love that we're talking about this

because that's literally like the process that you went through and just described. So how did your practice change after you kind of had, you felt that like permission to kind of start making these hard questions and bringing them to the forefront? Yeah. Well, I, this is actually a great lead into somatic experiencing because kind of the conclusion that I came to when I was wrestling with this concept of like, okay, in my personal experience, I watch, you know, my supervisors treat very differently, get similar

results. I hear about all these approaches that seem to be from a Chinese medicine standpoint, like diametrically opposed to each other, still kind of work. So like, how do I, how do I rationalize this? How do I try to understand it? Is that really boiled down to me is that it's about the relationship between the practitioner and the patient? And because when you hear about, when you hear about acupuncture success stories almost all the time patients report how they experience the provider a particular way and then what happened when that provider put needles in their body and that provider talked to them about whatever and so to me the first the first logical step was there must be something relational happening here that then grounds the physical experience of needling

in a different way that then is able to produce some of the changes, let's say maybe in the autonomic nervous system that we see acupuncture work so profoundly. And what are these other things that profoundly regulate the autonomic nervous system? Social connection, the presence of an attuned, empathetic

witness and partner. And so I wanted to then go and get trained to have like relational skills, not just be like a nice guy who does acupuncture, but like to actually learn how to listen to people and how to be with people in a particular way. And somatic experiencing made a lot of sense to me just because it's, again, like we said,

in the beginning, a body-oriented therapy. I'm not a psychotherapist, but I exist in this world that's halfway in between. I should live in a therapy that lives in the body and works from that perspective. So that's when I went back and went back to get trained in somatic experiencing. And so that was then the first step that I wanted to take in my own journey of, you know, doing my own thing a little bit. And that's how, yeah, and so that's how we landed with somatic experiencing as the first model I wanted to combine with with acupuncture. Amazing. And where did you find training for that and what was like the vetting process for that?

Because I'm also, again, sure there's plenty of options for you. So how did you find good teachers? Because I think finding good teachers is so important whenever we're trying to train for, you know, any sort of skill set. So just curious about that. Yeah. And I'm really happy to talk about it because, because like somatic approaches to therapy have really like blown up in the last five years, particularly on the online space. And it's kind of become this catch-all term for people who practice like therapy-ish types of things, but they're not therapists and they've got to have a name. So they say like I'm a somatic therapist and there's a lot of different approaches to that.

Somatic experiencing is like a like defined. model that was developed by Peter Levine, who was a psychologist, who started to break some ground in terms of understanding the physiological body-based impacts of trauma versus just the psychological and emotional ones. So somatic experiencing, you know, is an international training institute. It's a three-year program. They have cohorts that exist in New York across the country internationally. So, yeah, so you go through the different modules every year.

You have to get supervision. you have to have a certain number of somatic experiencing sessions with approved teaching providers over time. And so then, yeah, they take you through this process over the course of three years and you do all the credits that you need and then get trained in this very particular approach to somatic therapy, which has, you know, like a codified system. Whereas when other people say, it's like, I do somatic therapy, it's like, I don't really know what you do. Like, I don't know what that means, whereas somatic experiencing is like an educational model. which is what attracted me to it, was that there was a system there. There was a history there. There's a structure there.

And like I said, there's a, there's a teaching environment that they take very seriously. And that's what attracted me to it. Yeah. Also, you know, I read Peter's books and was like, oh, my God. You know, like there was something about it that just really spoke to me in the way that he wrote and described the principles of semantic experiences. So that's how I ended up there. What is a somatic experiencing session or like, look? look like from the perspective like a view, but also like the perspective of a patient coming in.

Is it very varied or is there like a certain benchmarks that are met or like certain steps that you take as a practitioner or is there going to be very like individualized? Yeah. It's highly variable. And somatic experiencing practitioners and the somatic experiencing like training program is very clear that like it itself is not a complete treatment model. it's something that fits inside of what you do already. So if you work in the psychotherapeutic realm with, let's say, psychodynamic work, you can also layer in somatic experiencing techniques or the lens of that to help

sort of, you know, put a certain type of spin on it. If you work in the rehabilitation world, there are ways that you can use it. So it's very, very, very flexible. And in terms of what I do with people, you know, well, here, the basic things that's always included in somatic experiencing sessions, no matter how you apply it, is just an increased awareness of what's happening inside your body. You know, the way we experience states of stress and dysregulation, the way that we experience comfort and relaxation, you know, people say all the time, you know, feeling really anxious.

What somatic experiencing is first step oftentimes is asking, like, how do you experience that anxiety. Like how do how does your body tell you you are anxious? And people say wildly different things. You know, some people say, oh, it feels like this, I don't know, like a crushing weight in my chest. Other people say, I feel a spinning behind my eyes. Other people say it's like a pit in my stomach. There's no right or wrong answer, but we're trying to map how your body is responding to whatever stressful trigger is setting off your anxiety to learn more about what's happening outside of your awareness. Because a lot of times what happens, you know, our stress response is designed to be automatic because that was a survival advantage for a long time. Like your body just acts. It just

responds. And that's great because it can save your life often. But also sometimes when that chronic just acting out of your awareness is hard on you, meaning it's energy expensive or it's maybe over delivering a protective response, it's hard to kind of become aware of that because it's just happening. But when we slow things down and begin to attend to what's happening in your body, particularly as we contact challenging material, that's a great window into what we don't know. We know, right? Like the unconscious or the semi-conscious part of our experience, that if we did know that more consciously, where we did experience that more directly, we might be able to affect change on it a little bit more. So all somatic experiencing sessions have some element of

slowing things down and attending to what's happening inside of your body. And then based on what's happening, then the provider will sort of make suggestions or guide the process a certain way. But it is very client-led in terms of what the client is experiencing in a moment and were there just kind of mirroring it back, maybe offering a little bit of a different perspective and then seeing how that lands and then the next moment. And it's very relational and it's very like client focused that way. But that would be an overview of like how that goes regardless of the context. Got it. And so are you guiding that as in like almost like a guided meditation through like some sort of mental experience and then they're telling you how that feels in their body or what how does the experience like kicked off in the beginning or are they just coming to you with problems and then you're going to like unpack like oh, where are you feeling that in your body? It can look both ways.

Okay. Some people depending on their personality and depending on sort of their background and skill set, they work really well doing something that's much more like, um, uh, that's. that maybe shares a bit more of some resonance with hypnosis, where it's like, you know, more of a deeply meditative state that then we're still kind of dialoging about, but it has that kind of a feel to it. Whereas other people, it feels more just like a conversation. And that then when something happens and maybe the provider notices a little shift or a little something or a little change to be like,

hey, what was that? Like, what just happened there? Like, you looked that way and you took a breath. Or whatever it is that we notice in the body, that sort of signals to us like something, there's a charge there that maybe we want to just slow down with that at the speed of life. If we just keep talking and we're talking about our feelings and then my dad said and then we sometimes miss those little physiological bumps and it keeps what's out of awareness out of awareness. So we try to slow down and catch that. So it's very

flexible. So in my case, some people, yeah, do we do acupuncture and they're on the table and it's a more deeply sort of like quote unquote under experience? And I'm, you know, know, we're talking and going back and forth and they're relaying to me what's happening in their body and I'm giving them suggestions, sure. Other times are we just sort of seated having a conversation than more real time that then gets slowed down every now and then and turn towards the body when it's relevant? Yeah, we can do that too. It's very flexible. So now having seen you like in an acupuncture session a couple times, I can totally see how the somatic experiencing might fit in with that because you're constantly checking in with the person who's getting the acupuncture like, how are you feeling,

what are you feeling? And does that, so if you were to combine those two modalities together, would you then start to ask what people are experiencing psychologically in response to the needles as well? Yeah, this is where the combination can get intricate and interesting, right? Especially, again, especially with people with a trauma history, needling is an intense experience, or it can be an intense experience. And it can be an experience that sometimes for a brief moment,

or maybe a longer moment sometimes feels like a lack of control because all of a sudden somebody is doing something to you and it produces a very strong sensation. And that can be very just reminiscent of a time when somebody felt out of control in the sensations in their body. And so that can be a way in which if we do it at the right time and carefully enough, we approach the body's resonance and what I'm going to say, response to,

a relational moment that they don't always have complete control over. So that can go really well and that can go really poorly. And so I've actually, I've treated people who have come to me after having really bad experiences with acupuncture because either their trauma history wasn't discussed or, as much as I hate to say, there's a lot of practitioners in acupuncture and holistic health care that really subscribe to the catharsis model like okay we're going to purge all of this negative energy out of your body that then ended up being very damaging to the person because it was just overwhelming it was too much too fast it was re-traumatizing if a lot of times what trauma is is when a lot of things happen like too much

too fast and we can't keep up and then we get overwhelmed and that's what gets stuck in the body and so then if if your therapy is too much too fast and overwhelming in sort of like setting off the fireworks inside of somebody's body it's like that's not great either. So acupuncture can be a tool that we use when it's the right time. And so, yeah, so then it would be like, see, with somatic experiencing, we try to, you know, we try to catch all the little moments and we go very slow. And so let's say even before needling somebody, it would be like I would maybe sit with them next to them, like maybe with the needles in my hand and be like, even before we start. Like, what do you notice right now

knowing that we've agreed to do some acupuncture? And they'll describe whatever. the fluttering in my chest or spend some time with that let that settle or let that tell us something maybe today's not the day is what it's going to tell us or maybe it just needed a moment to be with okay now I'm good okay what happens when I put my hand on your arm oh it comes back again but at 50% okay so just notice the pressure of my hand while that fluttering comes up then what happens next and I don't know what's going to happen next but we go with that go with that and then maybe we don't even do acupuncture that day we do the approach but then the next time we come back to do acupuncture, now steps one through whatever, three and a half

are not unknown to the person. So then the chances of it being overwhelming are much lower because you've given that nervous system a chance to orient itself inside of what's happening to just see what it's like. What does it feel like? What am I doing? Where am I? How is this going? Do I trust this guy? And just reaffirming that every step of the way. And so that can be great, but it can also be not so great. So it's flexible in terms of how we apply it, but there's definitely overlap to be had. Yeah, you're reminding me so much of the conversation I have with Rua, Gilna on this podcast, who's a shared friend of ours. And we were talking about how, you know, he's using largely PRI approach, which we can also talk about because I know you're also in that

world as well. But how important it is for the person to feel safe before they are like engaging in these techniques or like going through a treatment plan just because, they need to kind of be parasympathetic in order for that information to stick into the nervous system to begin with. And if they feel like they can't trust you or they feel like they're in like a threat or a heightened state of alertness, then that's actually not going to be conducive to their healing process as well. So it's actually an important step in a therapeutic process and not just something to like, you know, overlook. It's actually really meaningful to see like what's setting them off and what's making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe, digging into that. and then, you know, being able to move forward in that more relaxed parasympathetic state.

Yeah. Yeah, that's, it's so true. And what I would add to that is knowing what's setting them off and also becoming aware of the things in the process that are setting them off that maybe neither one of us is aware of yet because it's maybe happening quickly. And again, a lot of our threat response happens outside of our awareness, the way our body prepares to defend itself or, or bear an experience. Like a lot of times that's happening before we know it consciously. And so if it's just like, okay, here we go. All right, we're going to needle.

Let me give your arm. Just, I hope, pow. It's like, whoa. Like, there might have been a few moments in there where their system was readying itself for like a little that that if we would have asked them after the fact, they would never be able to consciously retrieve that because we're just blowing past it. And so slowing it down and being surprised by it's like, wow, actually what's really freaking me out is blank and I never would have thought that and that again expresses sort of the

split between what that person's conscious awareness is knowing and is aware of and what their body is doing in that moment and then when we bring them together that's when first of all people just tend to feel better when they get on the same page that way and it also just helps us make just decisions clinical decisions moments a moment that match where they're at to do exactly like what ru is saying challenge them appropriately so that they can can change, but not in a way that is so threatening that the system turtles up retreats and goes into survival mode. You're also like bringing up for me just like how much of a disservice it is. And if you go to any sort of standard doctor, they have maybe five minutes with you. And like,

it's a very depersonalized experience that just kind of feels like you're a number. And there's no aspect of that experience that is giving you feelings of safety or trust. And it's like completely antithetical to the therapeutic relationship and the experience. And so, I mean, you can just see the way that that could also be working against people when they're trying to, you know, deal with illnesses, chronic diseases, pain, whatever it is. So it's so great that you and other practitioners like you who are positioning yourselves in a space where you can actually spend the time with people because you realize how important that is as a part of their healing process. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I think especially those with the trauma history, You know, one of Peter Levine's famous quotes about trauma is like, trauma is what happens when there's an absence of an empathetic witness, right? It's not necessarily terrible things that happen to us because humans are resilient and terrible things happen to us and we aren't always traumatized by them. But a lot of times what happens is like, yeah, too much, too fast happens.

and then there isn't an empathetic witness to help us land and come back and be there with us in that space. So by definition, a lot of the wounds we experience with trauma are relational. Like this is where I love the like self-healing interest that is that is that is driven online and people need to be empowered to do more of them more for themselves and understand and gain their own awareness. And that can take you a long, long way. But a lot of times there's an element. particularly with trauma that needs to be done in relationship. That doesn't necessarily mean in relationship with a provider,

although that's very helpful because the relationship you have with a provider is very different than a relationship you have with a friend or another empathetic witness. The empathetic witness of a provider in therapy is different. The rules of that are different. And so the ability to come back from and reorganize around the things that have happened to us, relationally in that type of experience is sometimes necessary versus just like knowing a lot about and doing a lot of exercises on our own and maybe journaling and whatever because we don't get

that relational aspect of it and that takes time takes time time inside of a session and time as in time because you can't make yourself and you can't make someone else trust you. there needs to be just a library of experience now there are ways that we get trained as therapists in that way to manage the way our body responds to people's rage to their pain to their fear to their overwhelm in a way that doesn't signal to them even if it's just on an unconscious level like oh i'm afraid of you or like i reject that or like oh i got to get away from that like a way that you can be present with that. And that goes a long way to developing trust, but again, especially in traumatized populations, it takes time to build that. And so there might be a moment in a session

at one point where you just, we do something very simple, and there's a profound change. And there's sometimes a temptation to say, like, why don't you just do that on the second appointment? And to actually, to bring it all back to my traditional Chinese medicine training, I had this supervisor who was this like OG Chinese dude who I love to death, Jo Jong, and he was great. And he would always say the story. He's like, okay, in typical like traditional Chinese fashion, right, he tells you this story that's like, you know, it's supposed to teach you this lesson. He's like, okay, let's say you go to a buffet, and it's an all-you-can-eat buffet, and you get your first bowl of noodles, and you eat it, and it's delicious, and it's wonderful, but you're still hungry. So you go get another bowl,

and then you eat it, and it's even better, but you're still a little hungry, and then you go and you eat your third bowl, and eventually there's one noodle, and you eat that noodle, And then suddenly you're not hungry anymore. Why don't you just eat that last noodle? It's like because it doesn't work that way. There's a lot of things that have to be built up until eventually that one noodle is the thing that flips. And so particularly in relational work like this, you need time. This is a long answer to say, you need time to build that.

And you need time to then have whatever that thing is that's eventually going to be one of the things that makes a big change. it's a lot about the lead up into it and and yeah time it takes time when you were in china so how long were you in china and what was your training like when you were there were you working also on our bulls or or mostly the like the acupuncture yeah so i had studied herbs in as part of my program here in the u.s uh in the u.s you can choose to either do acupuncture or acupuncture and i did herbs together and i really loved that part of the study it's really wonderful and and um very inspiring and ultimately I've let a lot of the herbal skills go because I kind of realized particularly speaking of being in China like like first of all in China they are separate like you are just an herbalist

or you are just an acupuncturist there's some people who do both but they're like they're like you're never going to even get good at one of these things in a lifetime what you're doing trying to double up on this right so that's their sort of opinion about it you know people have different opinions about it but the herbal side of things yeah like people are treating like 20 to 40 people a day and just like anecdotally watching what happens. And I was like, oh, I'm never going to have that amount of volume of experience unless I stay here. So I was like, I just didn't feel like I was equipped to really be that type of provider. So I sort of let a lot of my herbal skills lapse. And it's not really something that I offer people anymore. But it was a very

like touching, powerful, like inspirational part of my training there. And so yeah, so I was in China was mostly focusing on acupuncture. And, and yeah, I mean, mostly working under this one, this one doctor who again had this particular view about acupuncture being a metaphor for what's happening inside of the brain and the nervous system. And this is again where we see these studies and you know with fMRI and the way that needling points all throughout the body changes the way the brain activity works. We're still kind of at a fledgling understanding of that like in terms of what that really means and how do we apply it and how do we really harness that for the best possible use. But we're seeing, you know, the way that, quote, unquote, real acupuncture versus sham acupuncture

changes the brain and it creates plasticity. And so that was kind of the lens that when I was working in with the doctor that I was working with, that was sort of the lens that we were looking at it through. And that was kind of the training that that I kind of, I think, really yearned for for a long period of time because, like, that was interesting and inspiring and made a level of sense to me. And so that was kind of the diversion there. And then I was sort of like always peeking in, you know, with the herbal practitioners and like watching what they were doing and, you know, talking with them about it and being like, you know, very inspired by their knowledge and expertise on that front, which then sort of made me hyper aware of like how much of a baby I was

on that, that front. And so then I kind of like let it go. But that was my experience. Yeah, I totally feel that because I recently started some herbalism training and it's just like opened this whole like new world can of worms that I just feel like there's so much information to learn. But it is, it's very inspiring. I think, and I'm learning about like the constitutions in TCM and like how some people, well, how everybody kind of has these inherent constitutional biases that you can kind of use to develop a treatment plan for them and get them to be more balanced, which I think is really cool. And it's also, I love that level of personalization when it comes to treatment. It's just like really looking at the person in front of you and then developing like a tailor-made sort of

solution for them to that's also going to evolve as they evolve. But I've been like very, very inspired by like the whole herbalism I'm studying from like the School of Evolutionary herbalism, which kind of pulls from like Iroveda and TCM and Western herbalism. So it's like a really nice amalgam of those. And I literally like within the first two weeks of studying, I have like two notebooks which completely full of notes like just frantically trying to absorb this information. And I found it to be very, very interesting. And again, I think just kind of the similar way that you're approaching your practice and like your work is that like you're finding all these tools that resonate with you and you're collecting them to make your own unique therapeutic approach,

which I think is awesome because then you're not, you know, stuck within the bounds of one particular practice. You have all these different tools in your toolkit to pull from to help people with diverse issues. So actually on that note, how did you find PRI? Because I know that you've been dabbling there and actually I think we connected through Rua or tangentially. through Rua. And so I'd love to hear actually how you guys connected to begin with and then like how you felt about PRI as you've been learning it. Yeah. So I think, well, you know, you know, starting in fitness and movement based rehab, you know, in the beginning of my career, whatever, 13, 14 years ago, you know, you hear about all the different systems and things and, you know, they all have

three letters for some reason. It's like PRI or FMS or FRC or, you know, it's always three letters for some reason and you see, you know, how these systems develop and become popular in the industry. And so, you know, I had been, well, also just taking another step back, like, to what you're saying about these diverse approaches is that, is that how I ended up sort of doing these things was realizing that everybody was kind of saying the same thing, right? Like, when we think about chronic pain and movement-based rehabilitation, we see that as you you likely do not have meaningful tissue damage driving your pain. Like it is not a fractured arm that is causing your pain.

That might have been the inciting event. But now if you're a year and a half away from your broken arm and your arm still hurts, now what we have is we have a threat detection system inside of your brain and nervous system misperceiving levels of safety associated with movement, with load, with stretch, with speed, with position change, and is causing you to feel pain as a way of slowing you down and protecting you from doing something worse because it's misperceiving a high level of threat because of what happened to it. So then you can hear how that's very similar to the way that somebody's nervous system can misperceive threat in places that it doesn't exist, post-traumatic

events. And that's where it's like coming from the rehab world of that. And then hearing Peter talk about that, you know, in the psychological realm, it was like, oh my God, the tar. of these treatments is all the same place in the brain, but we're just using very different tools to access, but our target is all the same. And so it feels like these disparate things, but they are all aimed at the same thing, which is why I've sort of like collected these things. And so PRI, you know, and movement-based rehab in general, you know, is all part of that. Like how can we give the brain, the experience of orienting itself physically to its segments, to it's segments, to the body parts, to gravity, to the way that it expresses muscle tension, stabilization,

breathing, all of these things. Like, how can we set up an environmental context for you to reorganize in a way that's maybe more efficient, you know, takes away your symptoms, you know, that just doesn't have so much of, like I keep saying, you know, collateral damage to the rest of you. And so, so yeah, you know, PRI was something that I was exposed to like 10 years ago. It's actually a bit of a funny story. I had quite a terrible experience in the beginning because I, it was a combination of things. One, the first couple people that I met who sort of exposed me to PRI when I would ask and talk to them about concepts where they were not particularly great at describing what was really going on, but they were particularly skilled in condescension.

It was just a real bad vibe. They clearly didn't understand what they were doing very well. And look, this exists everywhere in rehab. That's unique to PRI. Every failed. Yeah, I just had this bump in of like, whoa, what are these people doing? And then I just also, you know, just like, again, through weird statistics, I had a bunch of people come in the office, like post-bad failed PRI treatment where they just, you know, had done, you know, whatever technique a million times over, which was probably not the right thing. It doesn't matter, but they came into me and then we'd get it in like two appointments and they'd be like, I'm so happy.

And I'm like, well, what is going on over here? you know so i just had this like very bad start with with pri that then took a long time for me to sort of like come around to and then meeting people like ruah and uh you know a lot of the other people that are in our network that helped me we kind of really see what could be useful in that front and then you know i'm still very uh you know new to the study in terms of it's only been about a year and a half since i've started to sort of consider some of that inside of the other movement-based stuff that i do but anyway that's that's a long story about how i um sort of found my interview with PRI and how PRI fits inside of this bigger thing that I do with people.

Yeah, I think that's actually a really important anecdote because I think a lot of the people who like practice PRI maybe like just took myokin or something or maybe also like respiration and they didn't go on to the secondary or tertiary courses like Rua is just like another level of person in like PRI practice. But some people think they understand it and then they go and run with it and then they could actually end up doing more harm than good or at the very least like not be effective practitioners. And that's something I've especially noticed with like with my own. I haven't started studying PRI yet. Keith and I bought the course respiration. We're going to do

it online, but we haven't taken it yet. But anyway, it's just my own experience, like working with Ruiz, that like there's so many subtleties of the techniques that if you're not getting those and it's not those muscles or nerves aren't firing in the proper order, then it's actually not going to have the intended effect. And so it's really important for the practitioner to understand exactly what's supposed to be going on and what the person's supposed to be sensing, so that that can actually be effective for them. And so it totally makes sense that somebody doing PRI is maybe not actually doing it because they're not implementing it in the correct way. Yeah. And like you said, this exists across all fields. You know, this is true of somatic experiencing. This is true of

the other movement-based rehab models that, you know, catch fire and get popular is that it's, there are layers to everything. And I think sometimes, it's tricky as a practitioner. This is maybe speaking more to the practitioners listening. Like, what can be hard is trying to understand, like, at what level of detail a system deserves your attention, because eventually we're dealing with situations that are unknowable. Like, how does movement really work? Nobody knows. You know what I mean? Like, it's so complex and so hyper individual. And we have these broad stroke understandings and we have the shadows on the wall of the cave that we're kind of like, you know, like very in a rudimentary sense building these models off of, which are great.

But sometimes, like, you know, you get high on your own supply a little bit. And we begin to learn these like self-referential details that it's like actually if you sort of just had stopped here with this and then applied yourself over here, again, with maybe something that's pointed at the same thing, maybe you'd be more effective at helping people. And so something that I always struggle with is like when the details matter and when they're mostly for you as the provider. right like they give you a sense of confidence it's like I know what I'm doing because I can name all of the and it's like uh whenever I feel that kick on inside myself and believe me I feel that kick on inside myself across my career I'm always I've now like trained myself to be like well hey like what what what do you what do you feel insecure about like what are you actually missing here that you're trying to like stamp over with like well let me tell you about you know all the things that I know

for sure right you know like I think those are flags for me that I try to catch inside of myself when I feel like I'm working hard to make up for something that I don't know and I'm having a hard time relating to the fact that I don't know it. That's a really good point. And that's actually something I've also learned in my like practice working with clients since I started in like early 2020. But some details like the person in front of you doesn't need to know at all. And actually it could be doing them a disservice because it could just confuse them and like overwhelm them with information. But that's it's definitely an art of like deciding what information is for you, what's for them. also what's relevant and what's not in general, too. So it can absolutely be overwhelming. I would love to talk a little bit of more about acupuncture. We talked upstairs about some of the research studies that have been done with it. Firstly, I would just love to know, like,

if you had a magic wand, I can do any experiment, what would be like the experiment you would want to do with regards to acupuncture? Oh, man. Well, here, let me tell you my favorite acupuncture study. Okay. And then why that's important, is because I would want to do like an extrapolation of that study, right? So my favorite acupuncture study was done by bye at all in 2017, I think, where they looked at, okay, so we need a little bit of some background information. When you're really stressed, when we reach a certain amount of stress, we know, and particularly traumatic stress,

We know that certain parts of your brain become inactive. In particular, parts of your brain that, well, sense what's happening inside your body, like interoception, parts of the anterior insula go offline for the officiantano's listening. There are also parts of your brain that place you in time, like that they start to lose activity, which makes sense because if you're in the throes of something, that is creating a self-protective response because it has resonance with a really terrible thing you've been through, your brain is having a hard time distinguishing the threat that is happening now from the threat that happened before. So it makes sense you're having a hard time locating yourself

in time. And we've seen this with traumatized people in fMRI study. So we know this as a fact that when you get sufficiently stressed, parts of your brain detune a little bit and they're parts of your brain that would be nice to have when you're having those responses. So this acupuncture study, right? They watch people in an fMRI, and they expose them to a really, really horrid smell, which you know it bypasses the thalamus, and so it immediately becomes a very threatening experience to the nervous system. And so without acupuncture, we expose you to this smell, and the anterior insula goes dark. It goes like, holy, like, no, and just shuts off sensation. If we do acupuncture first and you retain the needles, and then we give you the smell,

the anterior insula stays stabilized and does not turn off. And so why that is so compelling to me is that acupuncture, the way that I interpret that, and this is an interpretation, let me be clear, is that acupuncture somehow helps you stay in your body present with your experience to a higher degree when you're faced with threatening stimuli. Now, they did that with a smell. The study that I would want to do would be taking people with a trauma history and perhaps we've discovered through the intake and the inclusion criteria that there are certain types of,

let's say maybe sense memories or like they've done before with FMR studies, like reading a very detailed account of what's happened to them or whatever. So then it would be sufficiently stressful, you know, like in a retriguring kind of event with and without acupuncture and seeing if that helps stabilize those brain regions in the same way, because then how that would translate is that if I'm doing somatic experiencing with somebody and we have contact with difficult traumatic material, knowing that acupuncture can help their system stabilize enough that it's adaptive and not a threatening type of bump.

And so that would be my magic wand acupuncture study. Amazing. It's actually making me think about, I had a very traumatic dental experience when I was like two years old, and I had like really bad PTSD from it for like basically for years up until my early 20s. I would say more recently it's kind of been less. But the dentist is like a very stressful experience. experience for a lot of people. I wonder if we could put some needles in people before that and it would help. Sure. Sure. Yeah, it would be any types of things. Just see, let's see like how it,

how it acutely, yeah, how it acutely helps people manage their level of sympathetic activation. Yeah. And if that can be useful clinically. Yeah. Is that like help getting in or staying into a, like a more parasympathetic state? Is that only when the needles are in or does that last after they're removed? That's a great question. I don't know. And well, this is where I think, because like how would we measure that, right? Because if we're measuring that in the initial study by fMRI, obviously the patient's going to leave and we can't keep track.

But we have done like studies on heart variability. Yeah, I was just going to. Yeah. And it does seem to, again, we don't have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who have done it, but it does seem to meaningfully improve heart variability, at least in a statistically significant way, post, you know, because again, we're just having devices where they're getting measured every day. and they're getting treated at whatever frequency the study has prescribed the frequency,

and that we do see meaningful shifts inside of that. So I would imagine we could study that more deeply by staying on top of, yeah, HRV. Well, that would be, like, potentially a cool approach for anybody who works in acupuncture or maybe just in therapy in general. Like, if you can get meaningful increases in HRV, you can have somebody tracking their HRV when it starts maybe going back down to some baseline. Maybe they're due for another treatment, for example. Sure.

And then you could maybe ride that and maybe eventually you can just maintain it at its height because you've been reinforcing those positive patterns for long enough that you're going to basically get them to stick. Yeah. As you say that, it reminds me I had one of my one of my longer term clients that I've worked with for a long time and we do a combination of acupuncture and somatic experiencing. And, you know, he's like a, he's like a New York finance guy who, you know, you would not expect to show up in a, in my office of all things. And, you know, I think he was open-minded, but was also kind of skeptical, which I enjoy and appreciate because I'm like that. But I think what really what really sold him on the process was,

you know, he wears an aura ring and the aura data from the session, his heart rate variability was like unbelievably different from when he sleeps in a very positive way. And his low heart rate was like super low. And so he could tell like something physiological just changed for me. And I think for him, that type of personality seeing it, it was like, oh, let's see. what this is about and go from there. So yeah, I think the more data that we can have to measure, like it's not just, our outcome measure is not just, I think I sort of kind of feel better.

You know, that's obviously important. We want people to subjectively feel better. But if we can get both at the same time, why not get both? That's great, that's powerful, that's meaningful. And also sometimes the data changes before the subjectivity changes, you know? We can see, hey, these things are changing.

Give it a couple weeks. Let's see what happens. Then all of a sudden somebody's personal subjective experience changes. And so I think just the more that we have that in the picture, you know, we're not, we're not taking it so seriously, where it's, you know, guiding every moment of what we do based on data, but it's a, it's a component that I think can be meaningful. Yeah, and I think the data can also be good for like buy-in and, like, building momentum for the individual, like, feeling hopeful about that things are

changing in a positive way. And then ultimately the subjective can start to come around, whether that's, like, due to the treatment or a combination of that and, like, quote-unquote placebo effect. Like, I think they're all important and they're all contributing in a positive way, to that person's experience. So it's definitely good. And there's lots of options also to get like biometric feedback data or like blood work data or whatever it is. There's lots of options for people to get data in general.

And it makes sense to combine those together to be able to just treat your patients better and get better results for them, which ultimately I think everybody is, that's what everybody wants. Yeah. Yeah. Are there any studies in acupuncture that you or like modalities of studying acupuncture that you disagree with or that you're not. not sure about how they're interpreted or anything like that that, like, you're kind of put off by?

Well, it brings up this bigger topic that, like, acupuncture is just really hard to study. Yeah. It's really hard to study. There's a paper that recently came out this year that was, it took a look at and was challenging this notion of what sham acupuncture really is. We've had a lot of debate about this over the years where sham acupuncture used to be just, like needling non-acupuncture points, but that's like, well, you're still stimulating the body a certain way. That might show you that acupuncture points themselves may not be as relevant

as we thought, but if you're still getting results by doing that, then we're not any clear about the mechanism of action and is that placebo or not placebo, that was hard. There's now devices that function kind of like, they function kind of like a stage knife. You know how a stage knife retracts inside the handle. There are things where when you tap the needle on the guide tube, it actually retracts inside and doesn't penetrate the skin. Or it taps, you know, there are a few different devices about it, and that's kind of the best that we have.

And this is the challenging thing about acupuncture research, is that it's very inconsistent in terms of results. It's hard to say that the effect size between, quote-unquote, real acupuncture and sham acupuncture is greater than something like 5 to 7%. or something like that. But at the same time, we don't know if we're controlling for the right things. You know, there's some research going on, like I mentioned earlier in Switzerland, where we're looking at people who are sensitive, medium, and low responders to acupuncture.

And why are they like that? And are there certain people in certain conditions that would get greater benefit than others? And that, you know, do we randomize for that or not? You know, like there's a lot of things. There's also not an incredibly standard approach to acupuncture. You could always say, well, what if we did one more needle? What if we did one fewer? What if for that person we put the needle on the one side and not that?

There are all these things that, of course, like, you can't run all the permutations of that research. And then I understand the contention with that. We're saying, well, if it's so open-ended and so complex, how could you ever learn to do it? Like, these are the arguments that I understand, and I'm very sympathetic to. So the things that I don't agree with in acupuncture research is that I'm just kind of like, I don't know if we've got the sham thing really figured out. I don't know if we've got that figured out. And the thing that is just most compelling that I think everybody overlooks,

there's a study done like 10 years ago, like 2013 or 2011, I forget the date, but in the early part of the teens where, you know, we looked at migraine in acupuncture. And everybody loves to quote that study as, showing how, you know, nonsensical acupuncture is because the sham acupuncture was as or maybe even a little bit more successful than real acupuncture.

But what they forget to mention is that both of them outperformed drugs. So what the hell is that about? How does fake acupuncture outperform drugs for migraine? That is interesting. As a practitioner, not as an

acupuncture. Some good crap about acupuncture. Like, what is it about sham acupuncture that had such a strong effect size that is way stronger than a placebo pill? And this brings me back to why I do what I do. There must be something relational that's happening there that's then shifting the person's autonomics that then makes a meaningful change in their system. Right. So these studies where sham acupuncture has such an outsized effect, I think you're asking the wrong question. why does sham acupuncture have such a strong effect it's it's not just 10 to 30 percent like a typical pharmaceutical placebo it's it can be oftentimes dramatic what is that like what is that we should be

looking at what that is as people who are not dead set against deflating acupuncture and then also not dead set and crusading for acupuncture people who are just trying to help people with a migraine you need to look at that data and be like, what is happening here? That's the thing that I think people get wrong with. I mean, this just is so relevant to science in general, like asking good questions or the right question, like asking the right question is so, so important because the question you ask is, in a lot of ways, going to dictate the answer that you're getting because there's going to be biases built into the way you're designing an experiment to try to get the answer that you think you're supposed to be getting to begin with. And then also the issue of like cherry picking data from studies, like you said, like that study is being used to poo-poo on acupuncture when instead you could be drawing this really striking comparison between the, you know, the pharmacologic approach and the sham and regular acupuncture and like what's going on there, like you said.

So there's so many different levels that papers can be interpreted and data can be kind of cherry-picked and looked at and drawing the right comparisons. asking the right questions. So, so important. And it's something that I come up a lot against, too, just in my own line of work and my time at Princeton, where we're just kind of, I just became very disillusioned with the system because it just seems like most of the people

in PhD programs are basically being given projects. They already know what answer they're supposed to get. And then they're just basically working to get that answer instead of actually exploring and like a very open and curious. way. And it's discouraging in a lot of ways because that's really the death of real science. It's when science becomes the science and it's like this dogmatic thing that we're just using to feed into like this weird industrial complex that we're building. So yeah, it's definitely present in kind of all aspects of research fields, it seems like. Yeah. I would love to hear a little

bit about how people tend to find you because it sounds like you had this one finance guy who kind of stumbled in, you wouldn't have necessarily expected him to. Are you mostly found by like word of mouth or, you know, what does that look like for most people coming to you? Sure. Yeah, I would say the overwhelming majority is word of mouth for all of the complexities that we've described. It's like, okay, it's like he's this guy. Who is he? He's an acupuncturist. Yeah, but he's not like a, oh, you like, you know, there's the whole like fancy footwork about trying to explain the intersection of things that I do. And that's, that's hard to capture in a quick thing.

I'm working on it. I'm trying. Listen, I'm trying because I know that I need to get better at it. And not just for the marketing of it all, but also just have it straight in my head to be able to be like, this is really how this all lines up. And that's part of kind of doing my own thing. And exploring is like, I'm exploring, you know. And there's parts of this that like I don't have a practitioner that I look at that it's like, oh, they're doing what I'm doing and let me talk to them.

It's like I have to talk to the therapists that I consult with and train with and then talk to the physical therapist that I know and respect and the functional neuro people. You know, and then like try to mix it all together. And so it's sometimes hard to talk about in a really succinct way like what I do. So having somebody who's had an experience first and then like, hey, look, this is how Matt helped me. This thing, this thing, this thing, this thing is the easiest way. You know, I try to write about what I do and be online, but I'm not a super online person. I have a very fraught relationship with all of that. I know that it's important.

And like I said a moment ago, it's a good exercise to get good at refining and distilling the message. So those are the ways that I'm working on it. But it's mostly, yeah, from people who have had an experience and then we're able to explain that to somebody else. And then that's how they find me. Got it. Would you be open to describing some like case studies of cases that have been like

particularly impactful in your development as a practitioner or anything that really stands out with regards to people's results, for example. Oh, yeah, sure. Well, I think maybe, let's see, I think, well, here, you can cut this story if you want or not. Yeah, see if this one works. I can give you another one, if not. Sure.

This might describe again, this might articulate a bit about, like, where I exist in the rehab and therapy space. and the intersection with PRI and all this other stuff. So this woman had come to me who was experiencing a lot of neck pain and back pain and had seen a couple PRI providers and like good PRI providers, people who I knew, like knew what they were doing. And wasn't getting the results that they would expect. And again, from a PRI standpoint, they were doing a lot of the right things and it was all good.

and they were working with the relationship of her neck and her eyes, and in particular, her left peripheral vision, because from a PRI standpoint, that that's very important to the way that the body orientes itself and uses muscle tension. So the presumption was we're not getting enough of this left peripheral optic flow, which is leading to this neck tension, and the body is having a hard time stabilizing itself in an efficient way because of that. But none of the neck and eye techniques from the PRI catalog were working that well,

And so when she came to me and we did the history, she had a history of sexual assault. And as we sort of again, and I'm pressing fast forward on this story, you know, it took some time to get there. But basically, like when we started to do somatic experiencing with movement stuff, what we sort of came to understand was part of how she survived the experience was by turning her head to the right and just keeping her vision off to. the right to sort of just like check out and get through. And so what ended up happening was left peripheral vision just became really, really strongly coupled with a sense of danger and threat because of what had happened to her. And so when she's given all of these drills, that's about like opening left periphery, all of that was happening way too fast because the last time she really meaningfully, you know, had an experience of left periphery was during this really

a terrible life-threatening situation. And so no matter how, quote, correct the physical technique for rehab was about that, we had to slowly unwind her body's threat response around how her body, you know, just readied itself to defend itself and to survive and what it did to her left periphery. And how do we re-approach that and reorganize her relationship to that? And then once we did that over time gently, then all of a sudden the techniques work the way that they, quote, should. It was because the bottleneck there was the threat and the trauma response because the volume on that threat experience was so much higher than just her neck pain. Now, of course, there's overlap between the two.

But when she would go to do those activities, there was a way stronger energy that would come online. This is like, no, you can't do that. It's really not okay to do that. And so we had to make it okay to do that by slowly unwinding that response. And so that would be like a clinical vignette of where something like somatic experiencing can work together with movement-based rehab to help somebody. Wow. That's very powerful.

And I think just really speaks to the importance of like order of operations with any sort of treatment plan where it's like you could be doing the right things in the wrong order and it's not going to work. Which, I mean, honestly, a lot of that you can't really even learn from like textbooks or classroom, it's like you have to be experiencing it in your clinical practice and you kind of see these things emerging as like a common feature across different people, which, you know, is so important. And it's something that I think a lot of people don't grasp is like the like the art of medicine or the art of like the therapeutic relationship. And obviously there's the science too,

but they both really need to be there in order for the relationship to be therapeutic and like productive. Yeah. Yeah. For that particular individual, did you strictly use like somatic experience with her? Did you also incorporate other modalities too? It was mostly, I see. I'm thinking back now, like, obviously once some layers of that trauma response were deactivated, we were able to do more movement-based stuff and add in that, you know, which eventually came in.

We didn't use a ton of acupuncture just because she was one of those cases where it was like vows a little too much too fast and that just didn't seem to the um the risk to reward ratio just kind of wasn't there so yeah so it was mostly somatic experiencing and then and then and then and then and then like like pulling the energy from that work into the rehab work was then the thing that really sealed the deal for amazing and were those results able to be sustained for her did if you ever like followed up with her yeah yeah yeah and so she you know she has her now it's now it's like what you would expect. Like she has her drills and her home things that when things start to go sideways a little bit, she knows what to do. And it's just at a maintenance level. You know,

it's not to say that she never has neck pain anymore, but her ability to manage it and do things like that is, is a lot better. And then obviously there are these other layers to having, you know, more direct work and attention and presence being given to this thing that had happened or that was still her body was still showing her that it was relevant, right? Because, again, a big part of somatic experiencing is to not assume what matters, to let somebody's system come to you and tell you. Because like we said, you know, the knife cuts both ways when we talk about the expanded definition of trauma, meaning it's not in the events, it's in how your nervous system

has adapted to the events. So things that are perhaps considered minor traumas like, you know, something that you wouldn't necessarily consider a huge traumatic event can cause a long-term adaptation inside of somebody's threat response because that's just what happened for them. And then similarly, people can go through really, really, really horrendous things, but maybe they had enough social support afterwards. Certain things happened to them in the time afterwards that allowed them to integrate that experience to the point where it's not really meaningfully on a day-to-day level changing their life. Of course, it changed their life because of the extremity of the

event, but it's not, it's not changing their life on a daily basis bumping into these symptoms. So, so we never make any assumptions. We don't know. But in her case, we saw that this thing was showing up and as, you know, wasn't just neck pain and that for her to come to that understanding, you know, things that people say in somatic experiencing a lot when we reach a certain point in treatment is just like, oh, like, I just make so much more sense to myself. Like these things that felt chaotic and disorganized, it's like I understand like why they're happening, a certain way and then I can be with them in a certain way that allows them to find a greater sense of organization. And so, and so yeah, so that was a part of her, that was a part of her recovery too,

not just like the neck pain. Yeah, I think a lot of that is really kind of learned in the way that our culture deals with disease and pain. It's like to numb it and ignore it and not to like inquire and get curious about what the cause of it or what it's telling us, which is unfortunate, of course, obviously, we don't have to stay within that paradigm. We can become more curious about our issues and, like, try to get to the bottom of them. Obviously, it takes more work than just numbing it out, but obviously, one is a short-term solution, one is a long-term solution. And you're right, we need both. Yeah. You know, we need short-term soothing and we need long-term growth. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times, you know, they are, uh, the choices that we make on those

fronts are sometimes like a little bit diametrically opposed. You know, a lot of times the things that we do in our long, in the interest of our long term growth come at the cost of our short term soothing, right? And a lot of times our short term soothing comes at the cost of long term growth, but we need to be able to have both. And part of, again, like an SE principle is the flexibility and the awareness to know like when we're choosing what and to just not be confused or disoriented around when we're doing one versus the other and then be wondering like how we wake up five years later in a certain place, you know. Totally. And I mean, I feel like most disease and most like issues that come up is because of some form of rigidity or like failure to be flexible in some way,

whether it's like literally in the body or nervous system wise or just, you know, with your habits or whatever it is. It's like there's this rigidity that's preventing you from moving forward and being resilient to your environment. It's so real. It's so true. And it's like we see this, we see this reflected at multiple levels of the system, right? Like somebody who, has back pain, oftentimes their body is managing that back pain with rigidity. We're using fixation to stop certain experiences from happening that are then unpredictable or we feel like we can't control them. And if we can't control them, our back's going to hurt worse because we're going to turn a certain way. You know, all of this is happening at an unconscious level for most people,

but we're using fixity to solve the problem. And the same thing is true with people who have, you know, anxiety and people who have traumatic reactions is that I need to control my environment because something really awful happened when I didn't have control. And so that can be done consciously or that can also be done unconsciously where, you know, I live, you know, live and work in New York. I've worked with a lot of people who get panic attacks on the subway. They're not choosing to have panic attacks on the subway, but the body is saying, this is the only way I can solve this experience. I need to pump you full of stress hormones in order to get you ready to get the hell out of there and run or defend your life, like whatever it feels like, it has a fixity and a rigidity around

the only way I can survive this environment it feels is by producing this type of experience. And part of what we're trying to do is introduce a flexibility at all levels of the system. And because those levels are connected through the body, because that person having the panic attack on the subway is not as a result oftentimes of irrational thoughts, their body is just readying itself for something. And there is something that about that that happens outside of our awareness. And there's something great about that because sometimes it saves our life. But there's also something, you know, a little unsettling that something just takes over.

And there's a part of us that has to reconcile with that. And how do you work with, be with, and in a certain way, negotiate with the part of you that just takes over when it feels like it needs to? that's part of the fixity and the rigidity. Yeah, that actually is bringing up, like, some memories of experience that I had on, like, more challenging mushroom journeys where it's, like, literally, it feels like this negotiation process. Honestly, it feels like surfing in a lot of ways. It's like you're literally on the cusp of, like, feeling like something terrible is going to happen versus, like, just trying to stay on the right part of the wave so that you don't, like,

collapse into it. And it's actually, so, like, as challenging as those experiences are during, it's really been quite helpful to have that ability to like regulate my nervous system in just like normal life because most things aren't as intense as those experiences. So, you know, it's easier to navigate like smaller things that come up. Which, you know, I think it's just a metaphor in general. It's like a form of hormesis basically where it's like this more controlled stressful experience. So I mean, in some cases it's definitely not controlled and unsafe for people to be using like psychedelics. Like there's certain contexts in which they're just not a good idea and like certain. predispositions to like schizophrenia

example as an example. But I think a lot of people are finding psychedelics to be an interesting option in a controlled environment and like a safe environment to explore some of the, I don't know, like the subconscious or like the deeper parts of our bodies and our minds that maybe

kind of go by the wayside in like normal waking consciousness. And that's also working on like the default mode network and like that rigidity we're talking about it tends to loosen that up and make room for. for new patterns to emerge. And actually that reminds me of what I was going to mention earlier. When you're talking about like nervous system flexibility,

I was thinking about on the herbal approach, there's like lines main, but also like psilocybin micro doses. They're often being combined to like help with making new neural connections and like spine formation, but also like neurogenesis, like making new nerves and new connections. And there's like some interesting parallels with, I talked about this with Rua as well,

like how maybe we could use something like that to help expedite results. in certain contexts. I think there's like lots of potential for like combined therapies in that way. Yeah, sure. That's super cool. Yeah,

I think that's really when we talk about the magic dose of any treatment. It's exactly what you said about being in that. It's very much like surfing. Yeah. You like we need to, and this is this is a very core tenet of somatic experiencing. It's like we need to have some element of

some element of some element of, some element of the traumatic, I don't know if traumatic response is the right word, but we need some level of the way that that activation turns on inside of somebody. We need that energy present inside the system. Yeah. And just enough so that then, like you say, you learn to surf with it and change what happens so that it's not just running the automated A, B, C, D, E, F, G that it knows. and the way that you support yourself or support your client in that moment is artful. You know, you support them too much and all of a sudden all the air is taken out of their room. You don't support them enough and all of a sudden things go off the rails and then it becomes more disorganizing than organizing.

And that's the magic dose of it all, right? It's like how do you stay on the wave and then let the wave, you know, come to shore? Yeah. And that really is an art because there's so many different modalities. you can leverage there. Like I love to use essential oils. I love to use like light, like color, sound, of course. Like there's so many ways to shape an environment to help you feel more safe, especially if your nervous system is experiencing something more challenging. So I think it's great to be able to leverage those and use those as tools to, you know, help get the results that

your client or a patient is looking for. I wanted to circle back briefly because I forgot to ask you this earlier. How did you get into like training to begin with? Were you always like an athlete and like super into like strength and training and all of that? Or what how did that emerge? Yeah, no, not really. I mean, I was a very, I was very athletic as a kid and, and, and yeah, through high school, it wasn't like my my whole life and thing. Like I wasn't, I didn't, especially in my teens and everything didn't like identify as an athlete, but it was a very physical person. Like I'm a very kinesthetically oriented person. And so, you know, I got into training because I was moving to New York. I needed a job.

I had never worked in like hospitality or anything like that. I had done like, you know, construction and all those other crap when I was when I was younger. I think you'd be a really good sommelier, side note. You just have like the air of like sophistication and expertise. I don't know anything about wine. That's very funny. I'm like, this, yes, is a white. It's like Michael Scotson.

But yeah, so I, you know, I had just kind of gotten, you know, but I, you know, in college and stuff, I had gotten back into exercise and, and, you know, had found joy in it and was like, well, here, let me do this as like my job when I show up in New York. And that's how it kind of got started. And then that, that was sort of my window into rehab and into whatever. Because, like, I had had no experience prior to that. Like, I had never, I didn't get it. I didn't get hurt and then had like a great experience with physical therapy and be like,

I'm going to help people with. Like, I had not had. any of those experiences prior to that, it was purely through, like, I knew that, like, my values and stuff, I wanted to help people. I wanted to help people with their health. I wanted to help people connect and relate to their physical and psychological experiences together. But I just didn't really have any idea at that age of, like, how I was going to execute that, you know? And exercise was just a way in to work with people. And that's how I got started. And then that's what sort of the, you know, with the thread that I started to pull

and then run into the other things, but yeah. That makes sense? That makes sense. Where did you go to college? I went to study. Oh, man. This is going to be such a tangent. Because I went to Syracuse University and I studied both public health and I have a BFA in acting from

Syracuse University. What? Nobody knows this. What? Oh, my goodness. Well, when this podcast blows up, everybody's going to know. Well, here, the quick story about that is I was not like a performing arts person. Like I had got a very late started in Sartale's in high school. Mostly played a lot of music and then got involved in the performing arts stuff at the high school level.

I was like, oh, this is cool. And the teacher who sort of ran the performing arts program had a very like dictator relationship to the students. And so when my senior year came around and she was like, hey, Matt, you should audition for schools to go to college. I'm like, hey, Miss Saints, I don't really want to do that. And she's like, yeah, no, you'll audition for schools. And I was like, oh, cool, good talk. Good, yeah, great. And she was like, okay, look,

audition for a school like Syracuse, just one. It has a very good program. If you get in, you should think about it. And I was like, this is great. I'm going to audition for one school. I'm going to appease Ms. Haynes. I'm not going to get in. I don't have to deal with it, and that'll be it.

And then, you know, yeah, somehow I got in, and then I got some money to go. And I hadn't, like, we were just saying a moment ago, I hadn't been, like, inspired by what I do now. So it wasn't like I was, choosing between this other path and this. It's like I had these values that were very clear to me, but again, the execution of them was just not super known to me at that time. And so I just, I decided to go because I said, well, dude, if you don't, you will spend the rest of your life being like,

what the hell would that have been like if I went? True. And in the absence of being inspired by something else very clear, it wasn't like I was choosing something else that was really obvious to me. So I went and I'm very grateful for the experience because it taught me a lot about myself. It helped me develop a lot of skills in listening and being present with people in the room that I value a lot now. But it was very painful. It was hard because again, I just felt like I was undercover the whole time. Like I was here with all these kids who were like, you know, doing it forever. And I'm like, I don't really get any of this. And I feel very like out of my element.

And I never ever thought about leaving, but it was very hard. And again, I'm eternally grateful for the experience. And I would never change it. But it was a trip for sure and challenged me a lot. But that's what I went to Syracuse University. I slept in acting in public. It seems like there's this thread with you where it's like you're involved in these roles that you don't fully identify with and kind of feel like an outsider looking. I think it's great, though, because it allows you to like.

take what you want from those and then like create your own unique thing but obviously can feel isolating i'm sure at times but that's i mean that what you just said that's really it that's really it wow did you use your acting at all did you do any like small roles in anything um well no not really i mean there there was a couple shows that i did you know as a quote professional actor wow that i should ask for your autograph yeah right it's this is going to be worse than something it will No, but what sort of, so, okay, so I showed up in New York and I'm working in fitness. And what I started to notice, Syracuse has a great program where I did my last semester in New York. And they, you know, so they leverage all their connections with New York people and, you know, a lot of like casting directors and things like that teach the program, which is cool and you have access to them.

And so, you know, I was fortunate enough to be called in for some stuff. but I just noticed myself being completely unmotivated to like, I just didn't, I would get a script or something. I just didn't want to be like Kyle, 22, White in his play about feelings. You know, I mean, I'll be that guy when so many people want to be that guy and that's okay. And then I was watching myself like go in early to work to like learn from somebody else who had more experience than me with training and rehab and like how to help people with their movement and what to do with shoulder pain and stuff.

And that was like really inspiring to me. And then I had gotten, the nail in the coffin was I had gotten called in for Fuerza Bruto, which is a really, really cool physical movement show that I loved. And it was so inspiring to me when I saw it. And I got called in and do it. I was really excited and, you know, prepped and did all the stuff and went to the audition. It felt so good. I'm like, man, I could like, I love, this is what I could do.

Like, I love, this feels good. And, you know, this guy James was a casting director who I knew from the semester. So he called me up afterwards. I was like, Matt, hey, listen, dude, like, you are such a great fit for this show. It's so, so, so good. And I'm thinking he's about to, like, give me a job. I'm like, yes, I can't. Yes, yes.

And he's like, yeah, dude, we just need tall skinny brown dude. So we can't hire you right now. But it was great. And that was a moment where I was like, I don't think I can do this anymore. Like the one thing I got called in for in like a year that I was super psyched about. and then do it and it goes really well and they're like yes we see it too and then they're like sorry we can't i was like i don't want this to be my job like i don't want this to be my job anymore and then meanwhile the whole time this whole like you know movement and rehab and stuff was uh was picking up for me

and so then it became a very easy choice i was like i just this is not my thing wow wow i know very few people know that story so now it's out there oh yes now you're very public and you're going to be famous now are there any clips of you online people can find in the bowels of the internet. This is, since I'm, you know, since I'm a man of a certain age, this existed pre, you know, the blow up of social media. So no, there are no incriminating videos online. I see.

How did BMX come into all this? Do you do that? You work with those athletes, but you also do it yourself? Oh, oh, yeah. So, so, yeah, motorcyclists and stuff like that. That's a big part of what I do. Yeah. So, yes, I am a very slow, not good.

amateur track rider of a motorcycle, but I work with people who are really great at it and some pros who I've been fortunate enough to develop relationships with, and that's a lot of fun. I love working with them. I work with the Yamaha Champions Riding School, which is a school that teaches at racetracks across mostly the U.S., but there's a lot of international schools too, where it's, again, just taking people, it's not like a license-granting school. It's like once you've had your license and you've been writing, riding a bike, how to really like learn higher technical skills if you want to race or if you

want to do track days or if you just want to learn like how to ride a motorcycle well. They teach this two-day program at race tracks across the country. I attended the course like five years ago just for myself because I loved what they did and was very inspired by it. And we got kind of talking and they sort of found out what I do. And they're like, oh, we have somebody who does like physical rehab and talks about like what you can do to help with like the movement requirements of a sport bike out on the West Coast, but we don't have anybody on the East Coast, and do you want to, like, partner

and do that? And so that was about five years ago, and so I've done that and love working with the school. And then, yeah, just from there, it's sort of like developed this niche of mine of somebody falls off a motorcycle and gives me a call. Wow. How did you connect with them to begin with? Did you have an interest in riding motorcycles, and that's how it started? Yeah. Well, yeah, I got a very late start riding motorcycles. I had never been on a motorcycle until I was 30, and I was in Vietnam at the time. And that's how you get around. And I was like, you know what? I am just going to get a motorcycle figured out and ride across the country. And so, and I did. And it was amazing. And then I was like, oh, I have to do this forever now. So I came home from that, got my license, and then just started

riding a bunch and just fell in love with it. And then found the school through my exploration of just my own riding. And I was like, wow, these people really seem to know what they're doing. And just, yeah, then just attended the school as a student. And then we got talking. And then we got talking. And then got involved as an instructor for them in the rest of history. Wow. Awesome. So yeah, it sounds like, I mean, you have a quite diverse clientele, it seems like, athletes. And so what is what does your demographics typically look like? Is it like half athletes and half other people or what does that look like? I would say it's mostly, it's mostly everyday people, you know, trying to just go get the

mail without pain and do stuff. And then there's a, then there's a percentage of people that I work with that are either professional riders or I was on staff at New York City Ballet for a number of years and I don't work a lot in professional ballet anymore but from time to time I'll see people that's a smaller part of what I do mostly just everyday people for the most part yeah and then there's the overlap right where people who are just a serious hobbyists for motorcycle riding and stuff like that and see them with you know their their complaint might be my neck only bothers me when I ride a motorcycle, you know, versus all the time. And so that's a very specific type of work we're doing with somebody versus I have neck pain all the time. And it's sort of kind of made

worse by a motorcycle. So, but yeah, that's kind of, that's kind of the demographic of people I work with. Nice. Nice. You were in Vietnam. What were you doing? Just traveling? So it was on the tail end of when I was in China. I had wanted to go to Vietnam. My dad is Vietnam veteran. And so, yeah, yeah. and so I wanted to go and go to the different places where my dad was stationed and things like that and places where he was. It was actually a crazy story of that where there was a place where he was on R&R called China Beach of all things. And the day and the moment that I went there, and I have videos of this that just give me chills, I'm standing on the beach and it just so happens that that day that I'm standing there

on this beach that my dad was at during his R&RN. are all these military helicopters are just drilling back and forth over and over and over again. And it was just like for like an hour, just these helicopters going back and forth and back and forth. It was so crazy. And that's one of the things that, like that was one of the first things I noticed in my dad when I was when I was a kid was like the sound of helicopters, which is a very subtle, but just a little thing inside of him. And so whenever I hear helicopters and stuff, I think of him obviously. And so I'm like, here at this trip. in this place and standing on this place where I definitively know he was and through these helicopters it came across. So that was my, yeah, that was my Vietnam trip. Wow. Did you do a lot of traveling in Asia outside of China, Vietnam?

I would have loved to, but I spent all my time in China and Vietnam. I'm meaning to get back, but. How long were you there? In Vietnam, I was there. I was just there for like a little over two weeks because I was getting back and my license had processed here and, you know, pedal to the metal of growing my practice and everything here. So I was just there. So this was a quick trip and, you know, just riding, but riding across the country and seeing it that way was just such a different experience and helped me feel just so much more viscerally connected to the country and the experience of being there. I don't want to have a run a motorcycle.

Have you always been like an adrenaline junkie or you're not? Okay. It's actually the part of motorcycling that is like the least compatible with me. I'm not I'm not like a huge risk averse person but I am not a let me jump off this cliff and see what that's like person.

I'm not like that but it does emphasize motorcycling does emphasize a part of me and stretches a part of me that I appreciate you know and look all the stuff that we're talking about high levels of adrenaline in your system high levels of activation, high levels of threat

and learning to remain regulated and focused and present and attentive. And, you know, everybody thinks riding a motorcycle fast is all about being like as aggressive as possible and like, you know, just freaking send it, bro, you know, or like, whatever. But actually, and this is what really like attracted to me, attracted me to the Yamaha school is that they're like, no, no, no, it's way more like being completely focused and embodied and attentive. because when you move yourself in a disorganized or sudden or abrupt way, when the motorcycle is cranked over, you crash. And so there's this little saying that we have like, it's just don't crash your coffee. And what we mean by that is, you know,

we have these moments all the time where we move our body and we're not really paying attention to what we're doing. So you grab your coffee and like it spills a little bit where you go to type in your password and you misspell it four times in a row. All these ways where you're, you went and you tried to do something, but you weren't really there. And why we say crash your coffee is because if you do that while you ride a motorcycle, you crash. And so what you're supposed to do is use that as a tool to then recognize when you grab the mug and you spill a bit. It's like,

I just crashed my coffee. I just crashed my password. And not to get all like, you know, don't beat yourself up about it, but to just recognize all the ways in which you're not really there and how you can then maybe be there and then do your thing because it'll hurt you if you do that on a motorcycle. And so that was a thing where I was like, oh, this is like everything I do with people. Yes. But I'm in a different context. Yeah. That's like a really important lesson.

Half the time when you're like rushing to do something unconsciously anyways, like it's going to take you longer to actually do it right. So you might as well take a little bit of extra time to just be present with it and and complete the task. So it totally seems like it's a great metaphor, especially when it's a little bit higher stakes. it's going to be learned more quickly because, you know, your, like, health depends on it. Your body depends on it. Have you ever crashed? I have. I have. Luckily, not badly. Okay. And I have not been badly hurt on a motorcycle, but I know many people who have, and I've helped to them and, you know, know what that's like. And it's scary. You know, it's, it's, it deserves to be taken seriously, you know.

And I think that's one of my biggest beefs with the motorcycle community is that I wish that there was like a bigger push culturally to be like, you just got to really take it seriously. You know, people out there, grown men, not young dudes, grown men, 40, 50 years old, riding around in a t-shirt, flip-flops. What are you doing, dude? What are you doing? You know, I've crashed at 30 miles an hour, 25 miles an hour. And if you're not, like, you can get really hurt.

Yeah. And they mess up. Like, what do you think is going to happen if you don't do that? So there's, this is, this is a big thing that I'm getting on my soapbox a little bit with the whole motorcycle thing. But doing what I do, it's like, can you not just two plus two equals four guys? Like come on. Let's let's put this together. Like somewhere to ego thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Or just, I don't know. Sometimes people just don't really, really consider how seriously we need to take it. You know, it's a big risk. You know. So yeah. So I'm not, as this is all to say, I'm not a risk taking.

person and I take it, you know, seriously and, you know, doing what I do. I've seen the consequences of not taking it seriously. Absolutely. Matt, this has been an amazing conversation. Can you share with us where people can find you and if they want to work with you and what capacity they can do so? Yeah, of course. Oh, man, I've had such a great time. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been great. How you can find me. Yeah, my website, Matt Tolstloy.com. You can find me there. Contact info about what I do is there. I'm mostly on Instagram of all the socials at Matt Tolstoy, so that's M-A-T-T-O-L-S-T-O-Y, so there's three T-O-L-S-T-O-Y, so there's three T-E-N-M-A-N-M-A-R. All my contact info is there, too, if you want that to be a contact point. And, yeah, those are probably the two best ways that you can find, read more about my stuff, and if you want to get in touch, be happy to talk to you. Amazing, and you do acupuncture strictly in New York. People can travel to you there. Are you licensed in other states?

I do. My in-person practices in New York. I also see a lot of people. virtually just for somatic experiencing. Great. Oh, so that can work virtually as well. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So is there an aspect of manual manipulation with ESSI, or is it strictly like you're talking through things? There can be. There are manual techniques that we use, but they are not necessary. And the overwhelming majority of somatic experiencing is mostly the relational component versus any type of touch or manipulation work. Amazing. I think actually that's something that expanded a lot during COVID is like telemedicine and like online practices, which, you know, I think has expanded the reach of a lot of practitioners to find new patients and make those connections. And so that's incredible that you can help people in that capacity as well. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. We'll do it again, I'm sure in a few months. Do you have anything that people should be looking out for? Are you developing anything in cooking in the background? Oh, God, no. I'm just trying to survive today. I'm trying to be better about being online.

and write about what I do and share more of this stuff. So again, thank you for having me here because being able to have a long form way of letting people know what I am up to and also if I can help you or not, you know, but no, I don't have anything major in the books. It's mostly just trying to get the message out there about what I do. Amazing. Amazing. Thank you so much. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll be back. Actually, next week I'm interviewing two additional people, but I'm not sure about the pacing of releasing those yet, but just stay tuned. Hope you guys enjoyed this so much. Thank you so much for listening or watching and we'll see you next week.