In this episode of AyahuascaPodcast.com host Sam Believ has a conversation with Joshua Sylvae
We touch upon subjects of somatic experiencing, psychedelics, trauma work, how to know if you have trauma and how to know if it is healed.
Find more about Joshua Sylvae at http://www.sylvae.net
Transcript
Sam Believ (00:03.153)
As always with you the host Sambiliyev. Our guest today is Joshua Sylvay. Joshua has been in the field of somatics since 2003. He has MA in clinical psychology, PhD in higher learning and social change. He is licensed marriage and family therapist and a faculty member at the Somatic Experiencing and Trauma Institute. Joshua, welcome to the podcast.
Joshua Sylvae (00:33.358)
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Sam Believ (00:36.769)
Joshua, before we begin, tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you into that field of work.
Joshua Sylvae (00:45.198)
been really interested in healing for a good long while now. Started off actually as an activist and was working against environmental devastation. Realized at a certain point that didn’t seem like we could talk people into making different choices as regards to our relationship with the natural world. And started to realize that trauma, I think, is at the root of a lot of these very destructive practices that
modern humans have adopted. Got interested in somatic experiencing as a way of understanding how we as animals might inhibit the release of traumatic stress and create ongoing cycles of dysregulation and a lack of resilience. And have kind of made that my life’s purpose for the last couple of decades. I’ve worked as a
Psychotherapist and focused on somatic experiencing. I’m now more in the education side, working with professionals who are themselves interested in treating trauma and distress.
Sam Believ (01:59.809)
That’s a very familiar story. You start working with trying to help yourself and then you eventually start helping others. That’s very inspiring. Joshua, for those who don’t know, what is somatic experiencing?
Joshua Sylvae (02:14.734)
Well, the first word somatic is related to the Greek soma and it just means of the body and experiencing of course is the present tense awareness of our moment to moment here and now process. So what we do in somatic experiencing is really in we weave the body into a therapeutic process where
We’re not just looking at thoughts or emotions, but also at sensations. So getting curious about what the moment to moment shifting experiences of being in a body. Oftentimes we gain access to what we might think of as bottom up information. Much of therapy these days is about top down control. So you try to engineer a different way of thinking, talk yourself out of different feeling states.
and try to domesticate the inner landscape. Semantic experiencing is much more about getting curious in terms of how our nervous system might have imprints that store trauma, that keep us stuck and locked into cycles of dissatisfying fight or flight responses, or the freeze response, the shutdown response.
Sam Believ (03:42.113)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because we do nowadays talk a lot, spend a lot of time talking and not a lot of time paying attention to the body. And how this looks, you know, let’s say a session of somatic experiencing, how does it look in practice? How do you get people to release stuff from their body?
Joshua Sylvae (04:06.766)
Often starting off with stabilization. So the first phase of the work is very much dedicated to helping nervous systems to function more in the way that we’re designed. A lot of people who have trauma are in cycles of dissociation, you know, where we’ve withdrawn our attention from the environment or hypervigilance, where we know there’s something wrong and we’re desperately trying to figure out what it is.
very little orientation, you know, connecting to the environment through the senses. And so one of the first things we’ll do often is to invite people back into the practice of becoming aware of the external environment.
Then we’ll progress on to attending to the whole of our experience. Oftentimes people who have trauma have gotten locked into a focus on what doesn’t feel good. So, you know, this obsessive cataloging of my distressing thoughts, my painful emotions, and my uncomfortable sensations. We invite people to also notice the other side of experience, that there’s moments of pleasure.
moments of comfort, moments of ease. And it’s just as important that we attend to those and really dedicate ourselves to feeling those and making sure that we’re aware of that as well. That facilitates what Peter Levine, the originator of somatic experiencing called pendulation, this movement back and forth between what we might think of as positive, i .e. I like it, or negative, i .e. I don’t like it, experiences.
Once we’ve kind of established that, you know, the supporting people to be able to do activation and deactivation, so they’re not just getting stuck in the fight or flight or freeze response, then we move on to working directly with traumatic imprints. As we do that, we inquire into the body’s experience. We see what might be incomplete in different events that a person has not been able to integrate.
Joshua Sylvae (06:17.134)
So sometimes the body wasn’t able to complete a motoric response. There was a desire to run away from a situation that we weren’t able to complete. There was a desire to fight back against an aggressor that we were overpowered or got too scared to actually be able to do. There was some emotion that was too strong.
for us too much. And so we just kind of tried to push it away. We kind of seek out these little pockets of incomplete experience and then try to create a safe environment where people can actually start to move that through. Often as that happens, there will be a discharge of energy. So it seems like the nervous system gets into patterns of maintaining a kind of chronic stress in the nervous system.
may be accompanied by bodily tension. And as we start to move that through, you’ll see this quite amazing spontaneous release. Could be in the form of tears, could be in the form of shaking, could be some other kind of process. But it seems to be a part of how bodies release intense survival energy.
And Peter Levine observed this in the animal world. Much of his early work was informed by watching nature videos and seeing how prey animals, when they made their escape, would find a safe place, maybe back within the herd, maybe somewhere far enough away from a predator that they know they’re safe, and then they would begin to spontaneously shake and tremble, yawning.
you know, so many different things that the body does in this automatic way seem to be really geared towards releasing those energies. And it seems like modern humans block that release in some fashion. And so our work is really dedicated to creating the right kind of environment so that we can move through, find out what’s incomplete, let that complete, and then facilitate the discharge, the release of that energy.
Sam Believ (08:44.321)
That’s great. Yeah, I remember hearing about that. I don’t remember where, but about, you know, the deer when it’s hunted, if it runs away, it shakes. So a couple of times when I drive and I get into like a near accident situation, which is pretty common here in Columbia where I live, the roads are a little crazy. I remember that and I actually shake a little bit and I don’t know if it helps or not, but I think it’s an interesting…
Joshua Sylvae (09:01.71)
no.
Hmm.
Sam Believ (09:13.281)
interesting thing to try. So you talk about the spontaneous release and involuntary body movements, shaking, crying, etc. We observe here at our retreat that sometimes ayahuasca does exactly that. It somehow brings in people that involuntary aspect and they start to release tension that way. Do you know…
Joshua Sylvae (09:24.558)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Sam Believ (09:41.249)
Do you know maybe of a mechanism or what do you think is happening there when you work with psychedelics?
Joshua Sylvae (09:49.39)
Well, it appears that many of the classic psychedelics, which many people classify ayahuasca as such, although there’s some debate, work on serotonergic pathways, specifically targeting certain serotonin receptors. And what many neuroscientists have pointed out is that those
serotonergic pathways are largely involved in inhibiting what’s called downstream processing. So in the brain, there’s always a tremendous amount of stuff going on. You know, we’re aware of just the barest sliver of mental processing happening at any given time. And when we take a psychedelic, it seems like it allows us to gain access to what’s happening.
and would be normally below the threshold of our awareness. And so it facilitates that union of body and mind where the higher brain is able to become aware of the things that are happening below the surface. Often as those pathways are opened up, in a similar way, I think, to what happens with somatic experiencing, but also different.
You know, you get that same bottom up effect where our emotional brain, the part of our nervous system that lives in our body, are able to start to speak to us more clearly. We’re able to hear them more clearly. And there can be then the accessing of trapped energy and the release of it. So I think, you know, I’m currently working on a text actually.
related to somatics and psychedelics. And I think that they do in a sense, similar things. Paying attention to the body, receiving information in that wordless language of our body, and ingesting psychedelics both facilitate this bottom -up processing, which, you know, as we said, isn’t as prevalent in modern approaches.
Joshua Sylvae (12:14.542)
to healing and therapy. So I’m really excited, you know, both about somatics, also about the potential of psychedelics, because we need not just to try to control our inner experience, but rather to befriend it and to allow what needs to move through us to be felt and attended to.
Sam Believ (12:40.801)
So it’s interesting that you mentioned the word control because a lot of work that we do here when we prepare people to drink ayahuasca is to teach them how to let go of control and build a certain amount of trust where they can sort of let go of their ego, let go of control and allow the experience to take charge.
Joshua Sylvae (13:07.726)
Mm -hmm.
Sam Believ (13:07.905)
So I think it’s, I think it is very similar, as you say, bottom up. Do you, have you ever thought about maybe some interesting way to combine those two modalities? Let’s say you use psychedelics to unlock and unblock, and then you use the somatic experiences, somatic, somatic experiencing to process the trauma quicker. Has there any work been done in that direction?
Joshua Sylvae (13:37.902)
I don’t know about work in any sense of, you know, experimental study, but certainly it’s been happening for a long time. You know, in the states, there’s the underground psychedelic therapy movement. And in those spaces, I’ve noticed more of an openness to somatics than I see in the mainstream psychotherapy world.
It seems to be recognized by people who are familiar with psychedelic medicines that having a focus on the body is really, really helpful. And a lot of the things that, you know, where myself and my co -author, Manuela Mishke reads, a lot of the things that we’re going to be talking about in our book are specifically about that. You know, how useful it is for the guide or therapist to invite the journey or to notice their bodies.
pay attention to what’s happening in the body and incorporate that into their journey.
Sam Believ (14:42.689)
Can you tell us a little bit about your book? When is it coming out? Do you have the title yet?
Joshua Sylvae (14:48.974)
Yeah, well there’s a working title. It’s Embodied Journeys. Not sure what we’ll settle on. And we’re contracted to complete the book soon with the publisher. And hopefully it’ll be out by the end of the year.
Sam Believ (15:12.289)
Okay, so for those who are listening closer to the end of 2024, check out the book. So in what I’ve heard from what you talk about, there seems to be this conflict between somatic approach and talk therapy, because one focuses largely on the brain and the thoughts and what’s happening up here and the other about the body.
Do you reckon there is some kind of consensus where they could be used together or for example, when we do our ayahuasca retreats, we do a lot of group talk therapy and it seems to be very helpful in conjecture with previous release and people actually open up and they can share more deeply. Sometimes they are even able to uncover trauma and then talk about it. So is there use for talk therapy in your…
paradigm.
Joshua Sylvae (16:12.014)
absolutely. You know, somatic experiencing is part of the emerging field of somatic psychotherapy. Though, SCE can be practiced either using dialogue or talk. It can also be done, you know, using touch. But I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, you know, I talk to my clients and, and though I’m certainly wanting to
weave in the sensation that people experience. The technical term is interoception. So, you know, exteroception is when I’m noticing the external environment. Interoception is when I’m feeling sensations in my body. And, you know, that’s what distinguishes somatic psychotherapy from other approaches to mental health is that it welcomes in that somatic dimension. But certainly,
You know, we want to be able to attend to, I think, all the different layers of experience. Peter Levine and his SE model introduced the idea of SIBAM that, you know, with our clients, we want to be paying attention to and welcoming in the S of sensation, the I of image, the B of behavior, the A of affect,
which is the fancy psychological jargon term for emotion, and then the of meaning. So we’re attending to thoughts, images, emotions, sensations, and then as the practitioner also noticing postures and gestures and qualities of voice, all of those different things. And my goal is for people to certainly to be aware of the body.
to welcome in information from the body and to do that in a holistic way that also welcomes in the ways that we make meaning, our emotional life, images, spontaneous pictures that show up in the mind’s eye. All of that is necessary. We focus on the sensation part, on the somatic part, I think because it’s the piece that’s most often underrepresented in the experience of modern humans.
Joshua Sylvae (18:37.294)
You know, many people, I think just by dint of our conditioning, we’ve kind of forgotten that we have bodies, you know, that we are bodies. And so part of my task as a healer is to help people to more and more get in touch with that part of our reality and to know that the more that I’m in my somatic experience, the fuller, richer, and more complete my life is going to be. And also the more likely…
my healing will occur in a full way.
Sam Believ (19:15.553)
So it’s more of a holistic approach. So a lot of people are interested in somatic experiences, experiencing for trauma work specifically. If we could talk a little bit about that, how does one know that he has trauma and not just, let’s say something else, how can you, is there, you know, metrics where you can diagnose yourself if you are traumatized?
Joshua Sylvae (19:45.582)
Well, I never recommend people diagnosing themselves in anything. It’s pretty tough. And I think people get themselves into hot water a lot by trying to figure out what pathology I’m supposed to label myself with. If we’re thinking about mental health, psychiatry, the PTSD diagnosis,
you know, really requires an event. So there’s these different criteria to get the PTSD diagnosis. One of them is the A criterion, you know, the very first one you have to meet. And that’s that you have to have undergone an event in which, you know, real or threatened death was possible, where you were, there was a sexual violation, you know, it’s a very narrow range of very, very intense experiences.
that would qualify you for a PTSD diagnosis. I generally think that it’s more helpful to look at the symptoms. That’s what psychiatry does in terms of every other mental health disorder. The term that gets used in the field is the etiology. That’s how something comes to be. So the etiology is what…
precedes and gives rise to the symptoms. Nowhere in psychiatry do they think about the etiology of different disorders. They simply describe the symptoms. And so the psychiatrist meets with their patient and hears about their symptoms and then gives them a diagnosis based on those particular symptoms. And as we know, there’s now zillions of different diagnostic categories, to use a technical term.
And PTSD is the only one that has this A criterion, where it’s like, you have to have experienced this kind of event. It’s certainly useful, I think, to be able to tie one’s distress to particularly severe kinds of experiences that we’ve had. But I think trauma is best understood really as nervous system dysregulation.
Joshua Sylvae (22:10.542)
That’s where the embodied aspect of our nervous system, the part of our nervous system that communicates with the brain, but also tells our organs and glands what to do. When it gets disordered, it starts to send up alarm bells and the, you know, our thinking brain is like something’s wrong. What is it?
what’s wrong and we start ruminating and thinking compulsively about what’s the negative things in our life. It creates these emotional states of anxiety or depression that make it really difficult to function well. So to me, it can be useful to recognize that there’s been something in my past that I need to attend to.
like a particular event, but I wanna know more, you know, what’s actually happening, what’s showing up in somebody’s experience. People can get just as disordered from chronic stress as they can from particular traumatic events. And this is something that I don’t think is well understood in the field, you know, that our nervous system is liable, you know, to the same kinds of…
dysregulation, we could call it, in response to the accumulation of small stressors, challenges not successfully met, as it can from a single very severe event. So, you know, in terms of trauma, you know, our founder, again, Peter Levine, you know, he’s always said that,
trauma is in the nervous system, not in the event. You know, which is pointing towards how, boy, some people can go through really, really terrible stuff, incredibly heinous, you know, events, and be just fine afterwards. I know this from from personal experience. Other people might go through what seems from the outside like a relatively mild stressor, and completely
Joshua Sylvae (24:35.118)
decompensate afterwards, you know, completely fall apart. I know people who they got into a little fender bender. No one was hurt, you know, car wasn’t even damaged. But then they went home and started to feel more and more and more anxious. Then they would, you know, get into their car and start to stress out, you know, they found themselves not being able to go through that same intersection or parking lot again, where they’d had that fender bender.
Then the next thing they knew, they were feeling so unsafe behind the wheel that they couldn’t drive on the freeway. And then, you know, the next thing they’re like, I can’t drive at all. You know, I’m just taking public transit. And then, you know, maybe they’re not leaving the house and it can become, you know, this out of what seems like nothing. You know, a person’s entire life is turned upside down. So, you know, I think there’s no.
objective measure of event severity that can really tell us what trauma is or isn’t. I think we really want to see like what happened that really disorganized a person’s life and is there some way of renegotiating that event that can allow them to function in this fuller way, you know, in the way that we were designed.
Sam Believ (26:06.305)
If only they, after that fender bender, they just stop for a second and just shake it out and maybe they would have been fine.
Joshua Sylvae (26:14.158)
Well, yeah, I mean, so many people, you know, right afterwards, you know, and they go through stuff, they’ll find themselves trembling. And an interesting thing about us modern humans is that we don’t seem to like it when our bodies do stuff that we didn’t tell it to do. And so there’s this trembling that’s happening. And a person says to themselves, ooh, this is scary. I didn’t, I’m not making this happen. And that feels very eerie. And they try to shut it down.
Sam Believ (26:15.393)
Joshua Sylvae (26:43.918)
They try to get back to normal, to a state of control. And I really think that that dynamic is what lies behind what we call trauma.
And incidentally, for whatever it’s worth, I think that that’s what gets in the way a lot in terms of psychedelic work. The radical alteration in perception and feeling and thinking states that happens under the influence of psychedelics, I think can do a similar thing to people, where it’s like, wait, this isn’t normal. I’m not doing this. And they freak out. It’s hard for us to let go.
And yet, I think so much of our healing fundamentally depends on that letting go.
Sam Believ (27:36.225)
Yeah, definitely. I think with psychedelics, it kind of helps people to know that they’re in the ceremony and they allow themselves to do more than they normally would. They kind of give themselves permission to have that experience. What you describe with people with like a lot of small, relatively insignificant traumatic events, but large amounts of those, it’s kind of like a…
death by a thousand cuts. We meet a lot of people like this that that sort of seek healing but they at the same time they feel a bit of like an imposter syndrome. They don’t really like to say they have PTSD because you know it’s reserved for veterans and people like first responders. So…
Let’s say somebody finds out that they have trauma, they work with it through psychedelics therapy, somatic experiencing. How does one know that the trauma has been resolved?
Joshua Sylvae (28:41.582)
Yeah, so the thing I look for is the capacity to reflect on the experience and feel appropriate emotions of compassion for myself to remember how hard that thing was, but not to be thrust into a sense that it’s happening right now. You know, the…
Bessel van der Kolk, you know, one of the leading lights in traumatology, you know, he said something to the effect of, trauma is fundamentally a disorder in the ability to be in the here and now. So when I’ve experienced, you know, either trauma or maybe this chronic stress, the death by a thousand cuts, I am continually getting pulled back into the past. My, my attention gets hijacked and rather than being present,
to Sam over here on my screen and this nice conversation that we’re having that’s inspiring to me. I’m thinking about, I’m pulled back into some experience from the past. And I might even start to feel emotions that would be inappropriate for our interaction because my nervous system is now preparing for danger.
And so, you know, so much of it I think is about being able to land again in the here and now, you know, and to have what I call behavioral flexibility where I am present to what’s happening and my nervous system supports me to thrive by giving, putting me in the right state for this environment. You know, so I’m not in fight or flight. I’m not in freeze, shut down.
you know, I’m able to socially engage because my nervous system is supporting me to be in the right state for that. So as I’m working with clients and, you know, we do some trauma healing work, I will come back in a later session to inquire about how they’re holding that event now. And what I want to look for is that they’re, you know, they’re not totally cut off from it. Some, with some approaches to trauma.
Joshua Sylvae (31:02.734)
You’ll hear people say like, yeah, when I think about it, it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s almost like a dream or something. Like, I just don’t feel anything at all. I don’t know that that’s actually healing. I think that that might be compartmentalization and, you know, altering the neurological framework in one’s brain in a way that certainly, you know, is, is relieving to people cause they’re not getting triggered all the time.
but it may not actually be integrating the experience and facilitating that thing that we call post -traumatic growth, you know, where everything that we go through can improve our lives, can make us, you know, deeper beings. so, you know, I don’t necessarily want people who seem just totally cut off from the experience.
But I also don’t want when somebody thinks about something to be all of a sudden back in that state they were in at the time of that trauma. You know, it’s like we want people to have a sense of distance, like, that happened in the past. You know, it’s no longer determining my life in the present. So hopefully that makes sense as a way of kind of talking about what I look for in terms of trauma healed.
Sam Believ (32:34.145)
So trauma is trauma response and let’s say our anxiety or depression not being in now it’s something we can’t control right? It’s it happens in the autonomic nervous system. So what are what are the tools that we we have to communicate with with our autonomic nervous system? Any any sort of
Joshua Sylvae (32:50.702)
Mm -hmm.
Sam Believ (33:05.057)
tips or tricks for somebody who let’s say is listening to this podcast now and they feel anxious or depressed.
Joshua Sylvae (33:11.726)
Mm hmm. Well, certainly the one thing that I often recommend in the beginning is what I described earlier is orientation. So if someone is out there listening and wants to take a moment, you know, looking up from whatever it is that might have captured one’s attention and begin to get curious about the external environment, maybe just for a moment.
Let your eyes go where they want to go. You know, if you’re driving, keep your eyes on the road. But maybe also notice a little bit, you know, things that you might not have been aware of. Colors, shapes. Noticing the room that you’re in. Your environment.
and just really starting to get curious about what’s out there.
A lot of people as they do this, they’ll notice that their body downshifts in a way. There’s a spontaneous movement out of arousal and into a kind of settling. There might be a deeper, more spontaneous breath or some other kind of signal that lets us know like, okay, we’re moving into some deactivation now. That is something that I have heard from, you know, not a small number of clients.
can really change a person’s life. It’s more regularly taking time to be aware of the environment. We’ve known since the 50s actually, Pavlov and all the experiments that were going on there, people had also studied the orienting reflex. That’s where we become aware of something new in our environment.
Joshua Sylvae (35:08.494)
and something novel and our gaze spontaneously goes to it. Like if you’ve ever had the experience of sitting in a cafe and the door opens, a new customer comes in, you can’t help but look up from your conversation or the document you’re working on on your laptop or whatever it is to see, okay, who’s that? And you know, in a big city, it’s very unlikely that you’re gonna know who it is. Like you don’t actually need to be engaging in this.
looking, but our bodies can’t help it. It’s like we want to keep tabs on what’s going on. We want to know. So, you know, they looked at that orienting reflex and they found that as people did it, their heart rate went down. It’s almost as if our organism is designed in a way where when we take time to move our eyes, let our head and neck move, swivel,
our body says, okay, I’m a little bit safer now. And of course, you know, this makes good sense evolutionarily that, you know, as an animal that, you know, in the not so distant past, we were not just the, you know, top predator as we are now in our environments, we were also prey. You know, there was a lot of, there was, there was danger in our environment.
before civilization. And it makes sense that our nervous system will be set up in a way where as I orient to the external environment, I feel safer and thus calmer. So that’s a trick for sure. Take some time, notice your environment. Another thing that I strongly recommend to people, and this was also mentioned earlier in how I might work with a client.
Take time to register and enjoy positive experiences. A lot of people get really focused on trying to figure out, you know, what’s wrong, trying to make sure that I know all the possible pitfalls that are, you know, out there. And, you know, it turns into its own self -reinforcing loop.
Joshua Sylvae (37:37.934)
of dysfunction. So, you know, I say, it’s just so important to take in the good, you know, to really devote ourselves to enjoying those moments of our lives where there is that sense of pleasure, comfort, or ease. So I strongly suggest this to people, not to try to, you know,
Not because feeling pleasant stuff is better, but just because it allows us to not get stuck in the negative side. As I’m sure you’ve seen in your journey work, we need both. We need both the encounter with our own pain and access to resources. The group.
the spirit of the medicine, the sense of my own connection with nature. All of those things are so crucial, I think, to the healing process that happens down there. I mean, I’m not there, so I don’t know for sure, but it’s, I think, a fair guess. And so, it becomes important, I think,
that we all remind ourselves and each other how important it is to be in contact with what feels good. That needs to be a part of our lives and it needs to be a part of our healing process as well. That’s the trap of anxiety. It’s like, I’m anxious, so I try to figure out what’s wrong. That makes me more anxious, makes me wanna figure out what’s wrong more. That makes me more anxious. And it’s a vicious circle.
as they say.
Sam Believ (39:38.689)
Thank you, Joshua. That’s great information. I can already feel the, how our listeners are calming down and releasing a bit of their trauma because you have a very calm and soothing voice, perfect for guided meditations. So yeah, if you’re, if you’re driving someone that might be falling asleep, it’s very, it’s very, yeah. Yeah. So.
Joshua Sylvae (39:56.398)
Nice.
Don’t do it. Let’s tell them a joke or something to wake them up.
Sam Believ (40:07.937)
You mentioned the encountering pain. I think it’s very important. Probably in somatic experience, in somatic experiencing as much as in the work we do with the OSCAMP. A lot of people really want to have pleasant experience and they want to see beautiful visions. But in reality, most of the work is done when you touch those painful memories and negative feelings and then you let go of them.
Joshua Sylvae (40:38.126)
Mm.
Sam Believ (40:38.369)
You also mentioned breath for a second because when I think about autonomic nervous system I automatically think about breath. I think it’s one of the easiest things for us to control and be able to calm down ourselves. Do you recommend in your work, do you use any breath work practices?
Joshua Sylvae (40:59.598)
I really like to make sure that people recognize breath as part of that calming response. I’m a little leery of doing too much breath control, because I can see for a lot of people how that leads into these patterns of inhibiting their nervous system that in the long run aren’t as helpful.
In the short term, like if somebody comes in and they’re, you know, they’re experiencing panic attacks, their lives are falling apart because, you know, there’s, they’re stuck in this fight or flight response. Breath practices can be really useful for, for grounding. But one of, one of the things about SE that’s really unique is that we’re, we’re trying to facilitate this, this bottom up process and, you know, you used the term earlier. I think it’s so important involuntary.
body processes. Really getting people accustomed to and comfortable with, you know, the body doing stuff that we’re not telling it to do. And, yeah, my little bit of concern with, you know, how popular and prevalent breath practice is becoming, you know, is that it represents this, this, you know, ability to kind of temporarily hijack
the autonomic nervous system and shift one variable within that system’s function. And that really can, for some people, not for everybody, really can lead to a quick shift into more parasympathetic or more calming in that system. But it doesn’t fix the dysregulation. So a person who uses breath to try to downregulate,
autonomic nervous system function can get relief temporarily, but then they’re just going to get stressed again, then they’re just going to get shut down again. And so, you know, I think it’s important that we’re not just putting a bandaid on that, which, you know, which you might need the bandaid in the short term so that the tissue can really heal. But, you know, you got to get in there and kind of work with what’s underlying that.
Joshua Sylvae (43:25.262)
I will say in psychedelic work, where sometimes things can come up so big, so fast, knowing how to facilitate breath practices that are grounding and supportive, it can make all the difference.
Sam Believ (43:45.729)
Yeah, that’s, that makes a lot of sense because you only hear good things about breath work and never hear the other side. It’s good to also understand that not to rely on it entirely and do the introspection to see what’s causing the anxiety or, you know, panic, as you say. One last thing I want to ask you, you mentioned that we are living in a disembodied culture.
Joshua Sylvae (44:07.246)
Mm -hmm.
Sam Believ (44:16.129)
Can you talk a little bit about that and say, tell us, you know, what maybe can we do to be more embodied?
Joshua Sylvae (44:25.934)
For sure. And I’ll just name that in there is an assumption, a sort of cultural assumption. I’m up here in the States and certainly I think fair to say that folks are mostly disembodied in this culture. I don’t know that that’s true in other parts of the world. I know in…
You know, got a couple of friends from Columbia and you know, they’ll report that, you know, people are freer in their movements. You know, there can be more dance that happens, more, you know, physical touching between people might be more common. So I think all of those things can help us to be in our bodies more. I certainly am not trying to say that.
you know, every culture is the same or only talk about, you know, one culture. But certainly, you know, where I live, I think there’s a lot of people walking around experiencing themselves as, you know, a head that is, you know, plopped onto this thing that they’re mostly unaware of and just expect to do whatever they tell it to do. I…
I, my life, you know, was really transformed by starting to pay more attention to my body. And, you know, it started, you know, with different, different practices I was doing connecting to nature. and then of course, you know, really, somatic experiencing was, was a big part of that in sessions. I also have been involved in different communities where we did somatic meditation practices.
you know, where you take the body as your focus of meditation. You know, I think all of that is supportive for engaging in a practice of self -referencing in that way. So, you know, if my conditioning, you know, what I experience, like, you know, I’ll do this thing. I’ve now, you know, I do a lot of teaching, you know, sort of traveling around and…
Joshua Sylvae (46:52.398)
I’ve now asked this question of probably, you know, easily thousands of people at this point all over the world. Did you, when you were a child, have a caregiver who regularly asked you what you were noticing in your body?
And as I pose this question to all these thousands of people, I’ve seen like one or two hands go up over the years. You know, it’s, we just, we don’t get the training, you know, we don’t get the reinforcement that this is relevant. And so, you know, it’s, I think a skill that needs to be built in life, you know, it’s…
It’s an area where I really try to apply myself to this. And I do that because I find that when I do, it feels better.
You know, it’s something that I like and so I pursue it. And so, you know, it could be as simple as just, you know, putting a little alarm on my phone or computer that dings, you know, every so often. And when I hear that ding, I’m like, right, okay. And I might have completely lost track of, you know, the fact that, you know, I have this…
a wholesating, kind of slightly magical seeming organism, you know, that’s humming away in the background, you know, keeping me alive and communicating to me all of these feelings of aliveness. And, you know, in that moment, I just take time and notice. I find that it can be really helpful. You know, I mentioned taking in the good before.
Joshua Sylvae (48:53.114)
And if I can, as part of that, notice how that pleasant experience is showing up in my body, you know, in the, as we would say, NSE, in the sensation channel, I think that’s important. So noticing, especially at first, you know, for trauma survivors, noticing good feelings in the body. And, you know, it’s…
A lot of my clients, their body has been a house of pain. You know, it’s where they’ve been violated. It’s where they might have a chronic pain syndrome or, you know, they have a functional disorder with their gastrointestinal system. And so, attending to their bodies is fraught for them. So, you know, I get really excited about people being able to access the body as a source of pleasure.
or ease.
Joshua Sylvae (49:55.982)
And then, you know, noticing like right now I was, as I was talking, I suddenly became aware that I am running my hand slowly over my knee. And it’s like this little self -soothing thing. And like, we’re doing this kind of stuff all the time, you know, as a teacher, I get to like, just talk a lot and watch people. And I’m just like watching bodies all the time, engaging in these little soothing behaviors, you know, whether it’s like.
rubbing my earlobe or twirling my hair, rubbing the top of my head, stroking my chin, rubbing hands on legs, putting my hands together. There’s all of these different things that we’re, again, normally totally unconscious of that I think are the body giving us this message. They’re there, everything’s fine.
You can just relax. And so often as I’m sitting with clients and they’re starting to work through stuff, as their system gets stressed, their body will start to soothe itself. And it can be very helpful to become more aware of those things and to recognize that it feels good in our bodies in some way when we do that.
Sam Believ (51:20.577)
Yeah, that’s great to be observant of that. So regarding the question that you said, if somebody asks you growing up, I think I need to start asking my kids that. Definitely gonna introduce this practice. Would be interesting to see how they grow up more conscious about what’s happening in their body. So this is a great advice. I really appreciate it. And for you guys that been… Sorry, Karen.
Joshua Sylvae (51:41.454)
Nice.
Yeah, they may. sorry, I guess there’s a little lag. I was just going to say they may or may not take you up on it. My kids, when I ask them like, hey, how does that feel in your body? They’re like, Dad, quit trying to be my therapist. You know, they just get annoyed.
Sam Believ (52:02.113)
Yeah, well, I’ll try. I’ll try anyway. I’ll try anyway. And for those of you who are listening, go be more embodied. Go do some dancing. Go hug somebody. Maybe sing a song. Do some yoga, whatever it takes. Be more embodied, guys. Joshua, thank you so much for this episode. I think it was very informative and very entertaining and also very calming.
Joshua Sylvae (52:03.822)
May or may not work.
Yeah, good. Good.
Joshua Sylvae (52:19.086)
Yeah.
Sam Believ (52:32.289)
Joshua, where can people find more about you and your work?
Joshua Sylvae (52:37.39)
I have a website. It is Sylve, my last name, which is spelled S -Y -L -V -A -E, sylve .net. If you want to learn more about somatic experiencing and the SE professional training, you can at traumahealing .org. And then there’s Peter Levine’s Ergose Institute, which is at somaticexperiencing .com.
Sam Believ (53:09.921)
Thank you, Joshua. I’ll make sure to include those links in the podcast description. Once again, it was a very great episode and thank you for coming on.
Joshua Sylvae (53:18.542)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was fun talking.