(Jess and Jeanne) Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-centered mental health podcast. We’re your hosts, Jess Warpula Schultz, and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you’ve tried everything to feel better and something is still missing, or you’re already tuned into the wisdom of the body, this podcast will encourage and support you in healing, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential by accessing your mind-body connection. Please know, this podcast is not a substitute for mental health treatment and is not considered psychotherapy. Let’s begin a conversation about what happens when we take a body centered approach to improving our mental health.  

(Jess) Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk. Today’s episode is the first part of a conversation between myself and my cohost Jeanne Kolker. We began exploring the mind-body connection and how we can improve our mental health by listening to the wisdom of the body.  Jeanne, I’m excited to share this adventure with you.  

(Jeanne) Thanks Jess. It’s really wonderful to be here. I appreciate your passion for this. I think that’s how we found each other. After all these years, we’ve known each other for quite some time.  

(Jess) We have, we have. Our listeners might not know this, but Jeanne and I met, maybe 10 years ago, volunteering at Briarpatch Youth Services here in Madison. And now the universe has brought us body-centered minds back together.  

(Jeanne) Yes. Yeah. I think it was meant to be okay. I agree. I agree.  

(Jess) So today we get to have a conversation about how the mind and body are connected. What causes the mind body to disconnect at times and why our lives are richer when we take a mind-body perspective to mental health. Let’s begin by talking about “What does the body have to do with problems?”. Often when we’re thinking about the difficulties we experience in life and the things that we’re working through, it may not come to the forefront of our thought process. That the body’s actually also involved and that there’s an innate wisdom there that we can tap into. How would you describe how the body gets involved in those difficulties that we experience in life?  

(Jeanne) Yeah, that’s a great question. Just, I think, our medical model typically looks at things just from a symptom perspective, right? So, you’ve got a broken arm, you go to the doctor, and you get it set. You’ve got symptoms of depression and anxiety. You go and you talk about it, right? And it’s, it’s very separate. But we know that’s not the case. Our bodies are where we experience life, and we have to go through the body door in order to really work on healing our whole person. Our thoughts, our emotions, and our physical self too, is all is connected in that way. And I think that it’s emerging, you know, obviously we’re here standing on the shoulders of a lot of recent research from all sorts of sources that are proving sematic approaches are evidence-based. They are the way to heal a lot of what we would call problems. Right? It’s not necessarily just talking about what’s going on in our lives. That doesn’t necessarily help us heal. We actually have to embody it. We have to create safety in our bodies in order to heal whatever traumas we’ve experienced. And we might not even think, “Oh, I don’t have trauma” but we all have some. You know, yeah. Just walking around in the world is traumatic sometimes.  

(Jess)I totally agree. Yes. I often say that I used to tell people that I was a trauma therapist and then it dawned on me one day that actually every therapist is a trauma therapist because every person we’ve all, if you’re human, you’ve experienced some form of trauma at some point. And it’s not just our mind or our brain, that experiences that, our body’s always with us. It’s always a part of the initial event and it’s also a part of the solution. So, I love that as a marriage and family therapist, we talk a lot about how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If you think of a family system. How all of those interactions come together to create a family, you think about the body, the mind, the brain, digestive system, you know, everything–our muscles, bones, how it all comes together to create this holistic system. I really like how you’re considering how the body is the key to healing. I believe that to as a body-based therapist.  Jeanne, from your perspective, as a licensed professional counselor, a yoga teacher, a yoga therapist, how have you witnessed the healing capacity of the wisdom of the body?  

(Jeanne) Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question that I could talk about for hours. You, you know, our ultimate goal in therapy and in our own lives is empowerment, right? We want to be empowered to make choices that support our growth, our health, to be empowered, to own the things that we’ve done, that we’re carrying, that have been done to us. To be able to really be in a space of making choices that support our growth. And somatic treatments and yoga, when we talk about somatic treatments, that’s the body, right? That’s just a fancy word for the body. Yep. Somatic treatments. They help us reconnect to our bodies and that’s where then we can regain a sense of control. Because when we’ve experienced trauma, it’s the ultimate lack of control. It’s the ultimate lack of choice. It’s, it’s an overwhelming thing that has stolen our ability to make choices and to take action in an empowered way. So, we use yoga, I use yoga, especially. I feel like it’s just, it’s the treatment that resonates with me. It is. It is the medicine that I have found the most useful in my own experience. I have a lot of history with yoga because it is something that’s been very resonant for me in my healing journey. When I was a child, I was sick a lot. I had a lot of physical issues and it turned out I had an autoimmune disease that was very rare in little kids. And it was misdiagnosed and I just, I spent a lot of my childhood sick and in a body that I couldn’t trust. I couldn’t do what everybody else was doing. There was no way for me to even do any physical exercise. My body just wouldn’t support it. So, I developed this really unhealthy relationship with exercise. It felt like punishment. It felt like danger because my body wasn’t equipped to do it. And I healed, you know, eventually as I grew. And I didn’t really start to heal until I stepped on a yoga mat and started to actually pay attention to the cues and the signals in my body. It was not something that I had ever learned before through no fault of anyone’s. It’s just, it wasn’t a relationship that was able to develop. I found a lot of healing for myself through yoga, and I wanted to share that with people. And of course, you start teaching yoga. That’s what you do. Right. You know, you do personal training. I became a fitness instructor. I saw how it was helping people. And I don’t mean that I’m not helping them develop a six-pack abs.  

(Jess) Right, right. Yup.  

(Jeanne) It was, I’d see people in my classes crying at the end of class or coming up and saying something. Something happened in that class. Something shifted for me. So, I really wanted to be able to do that work one-on-one and the tools of yoga are so powerful. They helped me so much and it’s not just the physical poses. It’s the breath work. It’s the mind body connection. It’s the philosophy, yoga really is a psychology of mind. If we dig deep, if we, if we pay attention, if we, if we find the safe space to heal. And that’s why Insight is so important to me. We’re showing people that yoga is a trauma-informed intervention that has evidence behind it. It’s being studied. Right. We know meditation is evidence-based practice. All of these things come together. And the body is the setting. We have to understand what’s happening in our bodies and change our relationship with our bodies in order to heal. And we can only do that if we have a safe space to do so. So, when somebody works with me or somebody works with you, Jess, the first thing we do, right? Safety, sacred space. Long answer to that question.  

(Jess) No, I love it. It reminds me a little bit of my story and my experience with becoming a body centered practitioner in that, I started having panic attacks when I was in the fifth grade. And I didn’t even know what they were. I didn’t even know that I should be telling my mom. I think I told her when I was like 30 something years old and she was really surprised. And in my brain, my, my “little me” just kind of adjusted around it. I tapped into my body, not even knowing when I started feeling panicky or overwhelmed and if I was at home, I went outside and I opened the screen door and it was cold, I’m from Minnesota, so, it’s usually kind of cold and I would take these deep breaths and I would feel the cold air on my face. Who knew that I was using the temperature to shift my nervous system, that I was using the long breath out to regulate and feel safe again. I had my own experience with exercise where I tried it, I would try out for teams and I would join, I’d be super excited and then I would quit a week or two into it. And so, it started being this narrative that I was a quitter or that I couldn’t handle it, a little bit of a shame story started right around that experience. But what I now know, is that I was experiencing somatic symptoms. That very much felt overwhelmed and very much felt like panic. And I didn’t have the capacity to tolerate them yet. So, I did what was best for my little me. I had a great survival system. I decided not to do that anymore. And, but, you know, then of course, finding my own wonderful therapist as a young adult and beginning to observe my thoughts and my feelings that naturally transitioned to this area of knowing something was missing, that I wanted to observe my body and be present with my body and explore this full holistic healing. The whole self-feeling integrated and healed. And I found weightlifting. And what didn’t happen when I lifted weights was that I didn’t get overwhelmed. I didn’t get trauma related triggers and cues of panic. It’s very mindful there’s a lot of weight on your body. So, when you, push out energy through your system, it’s controlled and regulated. It helped me build my tolerance to feeling distressed because it was so structured. It was like here’s five more pounds. I will be safe. I even have a spotter it became this way of increasing my capacity to tolerate things that were overwhelming.  

(Jeanne) Yeah, that’s a beautiful story. You really befriended yourself in a very powerful way. Weightlifting is very grounding, right? Because it’s like gravity, there’s the weight that’s really pulling you down, but then you’re also discharging your energy with it too. And just taking control. That’s wonderful.  

(Jess) Yeah. I love it. Let’s talk a little bit more when I say mind, what do you think about mind within the mind body?  

(Jeanne) I think about our thoughts, it’s our emotions. I tend to think about, like I said, yoga is a psychology of mind, and the ultimate purpose of yoga is to still the fluctuations of the mind. To still the “monkey mind”, the Citta vritti in Sanskrit.  

(Jess) Great. I like that. That’s the monkey mind. It’s chatter. 

(Jeanne) Yeah, it’s our chatter. It’s that thought? You know, body, you know, he’s really seen that as like a sheath, a layer of our being our mental being has a texture and a tangible quality to it. So, it’s our thoughts, our emotions, the way that we experience our world, it’s something that is constructed for us in childhood. And then we either live through that construction or we kind of reconstructed as we, go through life and mature.  

(Jess) Yeah. When I think about the mind, it’s more our thoughts, feelings, memories. How we shape our identity, our sense of consciousness, who we are as a person. You know, that is our mind. When we talk about the brain, I shift more into, it’s a part of the body and there’s different parts of the brain. And they influence the different systems in our body, our nervous system, your digestive system, hormones, all sorts of different parts of the body. When you’re working with clients or even today, having our listeners hear more about this mind, body connection how would you describe what the brain is and its role in mind, body healing?  

(Jeanne) So, it depends on really where we’re at in therapy, but I do, I like to do a lot of psychoeducation and I have my little brain model that’ll get out and show people the lobes the different structures of the brain that operate in trauma. How they’re so connected to the body’s response. Then we talk a lot about the thinker, the thoughts happen in the brain, right? They’re neurons that are firing, but then we also have the observer, right. The witness to the thinker. And so that’s often where I’ll take people to more understand that mind, who’s watching the thoughts, is there a compassionate witness there that we can tap into? And unless we start noticing that observing mind, you’re talking about noticing, we may be really confused about why our body is reacting the way our body’s reacting. 

(Jess) Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just that automatic. When people will say, I have no idea why I reacted that way. Of course, not because it’s something was triggered and stuck in your nervous system.  

(Jeanne) Yeah.  

(Jess) Yeah, and something I remind clients about mindfulness. I love to remind myself this; the ancient brain wins it’s been around a lot longer. Let’s not take it personally that we get hijacked and shifted into our reptilian brain, whose job is to just help us survive the next 10 seconds. And then the next 10 seconds, it’s not a personal failure on our part that we’re overwhelmed, or we shift into survival mode. It’s really natural. And when we can observe it, we can engage with it very differently versus feeling like it’s consuming.  

(Jeanne) Yes. 

(Jess) Let’s transition into talking about how the mind body connection influences our mental health. How would you explain this connection, this powerful experience, this integration of both our mind, our brain, and our body? How does that influence thoughts? Emotions? Behaviors? 

(Jeanne) Well, just like you were explaining, we live in our lizard brain and our reptile brain. And we tend to react to certain things and then not understand necessarily why we’re reacting that way. And, you know, nobody says, “Well, I want to be really depressed today.” Yeah, “I want to, I want to have a hard time getting out of bed.” “I want to not have joy in the things that I normally take joy in”. Yeah, no, we don’t choose this. And I think that’s a big part of what’s so brilliant about somatic therapies is there is no room for stigma whatsoever. Mental wellness is not a choice. We don’t have any of this. And there are so many categories of medications that work on the brain. If mental wellness were a choice, then those medications wouldn’t work. So, we have learned so much about it. What happens in our brains that cause these symptoms, anxiety, depression, compulsion addiction? We now know that there are so many chemical messengers involved in that and those chemical messengers don’t exist just in your prefrontal cortex. Right. Neurotransmitters. Hormones, that’s in the body. So, our bodies are the key because we’re talking about, you know, serotonin, dopamine, GABA, which these are all neurotransmitters that affect our mood, and they are all affected by what’s happening in our bodies. The serotonin is produced in our guts. It’s not just produced in our brain. Tap into that. We have to use the pathways between brain and body, like the vagus nerve, which I know we’ll be talking about a lot on this cast. Yeah. Those nerves are the key, that’s the pathway between mind and body. And we cannot just work on one part. We can’t just work on the structures in the brain. We can absolutely use cognitive techniques to identify our thoughts. We can use talk therapy. Insight therapy is so important. To be able to process this with another person but we can only do that when our body feels safe with that other person Yeah. So, it’s, it’s all connected.  

(Jess) It is, I was just reading an article by Dr. Kelly McGonigal. She also has a book I found really transformative. It’s called “Neuroscience for Change.” She was talking about if you think about how the mind body are connected, our hormones, right? Our endocrine system, our hormones influence our thoughts and feelings. I work with a lot of women. Especially in their mid-thirties to fifties, there’s a lot of different shifts in how they think, how they feel what’s happening to them, because hormones are really changing. Or if you have a teenager who, or an adolescent who’s growing and changing. Earlier you talked about the gut, right? The neurotransmitters, we’re learning so much about our biome. Mental health is connected to gut health. And there’s the reasons why we say I have a gut feeling about something. There are messengers happening all over in our body and right now in the middle of the pandemic the social isolation and worrying about our health and wellbeing, even our immune system, it’s really responding to stress.  

(Jess) Let’s talk about the polyvagal theory we get so excited about – we get so excited about the polyvagal theory. I saw this D.O. in Madison, and he actually, my vagus nerve was tight on the right side…Oh, yes, it’s fantastic. I should get him on this podcast. I won’t say his name. Cause I don’t know if he’s accepting new clients. He’s awesome. So, he’s like, “Yeah, we’re going to work on your vagus nerve”. And I was like, “It’s my favorite nerve!” And he laughs out loud. I’m like, “No, I’m serious”. He has no idea what I do or who I am. But he said that my right side of my vagus nerve was tight. And he actually through multiple different sessions, relaxed it, and I have felt such a decrease in activation since that modality. It’s, it’s really phenomenal, but that was a side note, everybody. So, vagus nerve, polyvagal theory. Why don’t you begin by explaining Jeanne? That’d be great.  

(Jeanne) Absolutely. The polyvagal theory came about in the 90s. A guy named Dr. Stephen Porges started to write about this nerve. It’s our 10th cranial nerve. So, think about the cranium. It’s right at the base of the skull there. And it’s called the vagus nerve after the Latin “vagabond” or Vagrant for wander, it’s a wandering nerve. It is huge, right? It’s basically the brain and its root system.  

(Jess) When you look at it, that’s a great way. I never thought to describe it that way.  

(Jeanne) Yup. Yeah. And it, it runs all the way down into her viscera, so right. Like we were talking about the gut brain. It enervates our digestion, it also has a branch that innervates, through our respiration and our heart. Then a more advanced or a newer branch of the vagus that enervates our face or throat, the social engagement system.  

(Jess) This has been a real game changer for those of us in the world of body centered therapy. This, this wandering nerve and that there’s so many different pathways our body communicates with our brain pain. There’s many more pathways that go from the body up into the brain than from the brain down through into the body. And in traditional talk therapy, which I completely agree, there’s such a place for it, can be very healing but often traditional talk therapy does what we call top-down processing. Where we’re processing through the front of our brains, where we’re logical. We can think, we’re human. Decision-making cognitive capacities are online.  But if you think about the Vegas nerve. That’s connected to all of our organs. It’s the highway that connects the brain to everything the body’s experiencing. How communication is really happening in our bodies, there is way more information coming up through the body.  

(Jess) The polyvagal theory for me it is one of the key concepts I review with clients. And that I’ve even found in my own healing to be really transformational. I love thinking about how my nervous system comes online and is helping shape my experience. Because when we talk about de-stigmatizing mental health, often we associate our problems or difficulties with who we are like personally. And when we look at the polyvagal theory and we bring our body online, the polyvagal theory says, “Hey, your body is actually doing really cool things to keep you safe, to protect you. It’s communicating to you. Every mammal does this, you think that your neighbor doesn’t have, you know, a nervous system? They do.” If you think who you see on social media is calm all the time, they’re not. Even watch our pets. You can start seeing everybody’s nervous system. Okay. Everyone, I liken it to, this is a side tangent, which maybe I’ll let everybody listen in on how my brain works. I liken it to the matrix when Neo has that moment where he starts seeing these ones and zeros come down and suddenly like everything opens up and there’s just so much more information. And he’s really tapped in. That’s how I feel about watching the nervous system, because suddenly there’s reasons for things that don’t have to do with personal failure or success. It really has to do with this beautiful system. Since in utero, that’s helping us stay safe. And we get to work with it. So that’s how I feel about the polyvagal theory. 

(Jeanne)It’s a beautiful thing. It removes the judgment, the shame, and we get to go back and look – we were we made to feel safe when we were little kids? Did we have a face that we could look at and see love? Could we see ourselves reflected in another person’s eyes where we’ve seen and heard and held, and we can start there and recognize how impactful those early experiences in our bodies are. And then start to recognize that we are not broken. We can work with the system to correct things that have maybe not been serving us through no fault of our own.  

(Jess) It helps to remove that sense of shame. I agree. The nervous system can be shaped. The brain is plastic. There are things we can do when we bring the body into treatment. That can shape the response. It’s natural for our nervous system to shift into a flee or a fight response, or even shutting down. There’s no shame in that that’s natural, but we can help that system leave those responses sooner. Or not kind of ping pong back and forth between anxiety or depression responses but go to what we call ventral vagal where we feel connected and safe. The goal isn’t to not feel stressed or not have those responses, it’s just to more easily go back to feeling safe afterwards and more easily go back to feeling connected to who we are. And we can shape that. That’s possible.  

(Jeanne) That’s very powerful. 

(Jess) We’re going to pause the conversation here. We hope today’s discussion brought new insight into your understanding of the mind body connection. Please listen to episode 3, as we finish setting the stage for why our lives are so much richer, when we take an integrative approach to mental health. 

(Jeanne) Thank you again for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk, a body centered mental health podcast.  

(Jess) We hope today’s episode encouraged and supported you in learning new skills and strengthening your mind-body connection.  

(Jeanne) We’re your hosts, Jeanne,  

(Jess) and Jess.  

(Jeanne) Please join us next week as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing.  

(Jess) Until then, take care.