137: Healing Trauma With Wesly Feuquay

This is episode 137,

Healing Trauma with Wesley Fuqua.

My name is Tudor Alexander and this is the Dance of Life podcast.

Every week,

My goal is to inspire you to take action towards what you love,

Live a transformed life,

And enjoy the journey there.

Are you ready?

Let's go.

What's up everybody?

Thank you so much for joining me today.

I have an inspiring guest with you,

A great friend actually.

That's the most important part.

Wesley,

How's it going my friend?

I'm good Tudor.

Thank you for having me brother.

Dude,

I love this quote that you pulled up for me,

Which is,

Fear is the memory of pain.

Addiction is the memory of pleasure.

Freedom is beyond both by Deepak Chopra.

That is like totally spot on with trauma and all these things that we are constantly healing from,

Right?

Both addiction to pleasure and traumatic experiences and trauma from fear and pain.

Exactly.

I think that's so appropriate.

Is that one that you've seen before this quote?

Or you kind of just found it?

I'm sure that came to me years ago on a social media platform of some sort,

But it really spoke to me.

It spoke to the type of people that I work with.

It reminds me that in both directions,

We can have attachment.

We can be stuck.

I think a lot of times we over focus on a certain kind of negativity or trauma or things like that,

But also we can have stuckness going the other direction.

It's interesting.

I was just thinking about this actually the other day because I'm in the process of compiling everything I've learned in the last 10 or 15 years for that course I was telling you about I'm trying to make.

One of the things I was thinking about was exactly this in the sense that you have fear and desire.

You have these two impetuses for.

.

.

Is that right?

Impetus?

Impeti?

Is there a plural for impetus?

I'll take it.

Plus it's a good dance term.

Impetus is impeti.

Basically,

You have these two motivators for us.

Regardless of what it is,

It's always taking you out of the present.

That's the source of suffering.

It was the whole Buddhism thing is that fear and desire is the root of suffering because you're never in the present moment.

When you're afraid of something,

You're thinking about what's going to happen.

What's that future moment?

You're living in that future or in the past,

I guess too.

Same thing with desire.

It's this constant state of an unreconciled present moment.

We're outside of ourselves in a way.

You look at all trauma,

All kind of traumatic experiences and they have some sort of attachment or some sort of incongruence with the present moment and some sort of future or something that hasn't happened,

Whether it's something that we want it to happen right.

How would you.

.

.

I mean,

In your experience with working with people and traumatic experiences,

How would you see that kind of plays into the general patterns that you've seen in people?

Yeah.

I've worked with a lot of people over the last several years that have gone through some very extreme traumas.

One of the things that I think is important when we talk about trauma is that at some point during that event,

Whether it be physical,

Sexual,

Emotional,

What have you,

There comes a point where the psyche can't take anymore and it says,

Uncle,

I've had enough.

The brain or the psyche's way of preserving our integrity in that moment is to employ a defense mechanism.

Dissociation is common.

Repression is common.

Denial is common.

Rationalization,

All those things.

And what's happening in those moments is we're scrambling to cope,

Too much stimuli coming in,

Too much that we weren't prepared to handle.

And so we start distorting reality.

And in that moment,

We do preserve a kind of ego integrity.

Through dissociation,

You don't have to any longer endure the direct awfulness of what's happening.

Through repression,

You don't have to even think about it.

What do you mean by ego integrity,

Like preserving that ego integrity through the.

.

.

Yeah.

We've got a sense of ourself,

Like what can and can't happen to us,

What we can and can't endure.

We're the heroes of our own story.

Yeah.

We've got a lot of opinions about ourself that we've been building for a long time.

And when a situation is going completely contrary and sideways to that,

We're trying to keep reality together.

And things can be so terrible or so shocking or so confusing or baffling that we're scrambling,

Trying to make sense of this reality.

And then there's only so much we can take.

And then we start to check out.

And so in that moment,

It's a healthy thing.

But if the psyche can't finish that event,

If it can't come back and close that,

Give the sense of self some closure,

Then those things stay on loop.

Those thoughts and emotions stay on loop.

It's constantly trying to resolve itself.

It's constantly trying to resolve,

Which we experience as intrusive thoughts,

Nightmares.

You know,

The symptoms basically.

Yeah.

Being triggered,

All these things,

You know.

And we call that post-traumatic stress.

We call that trauma.

And what it is,

Is just,

It is the incompleteness of that moment.

The psyche is actually trying to finish it.

And what a lot of people notice is that it's when they're feeling relaxed,

It's when they're finally starting to wind down that this stuff will come up because the brain's going,

Oh,

Cool.

Can we get rid of it now?

You're like,

No,

I'm at a movie with my kids.

Now is not the right time.

You know,

Can I get rid of it now?

No,

I'm cooking dinner with my lover.

Can I get rid of it now?

No,

You know,

It's always the wrong moment.

So what do we do?

We repress it again.

And so I call that emotional charge.

That is the thoughts and emotions that are on loop or the things that we continue to give too much importance to that mean something to us.

All that has something to do with trauma.

All that has to do with how we stay stuck being unable to have reconciliation or emotional,

Psycho-emotional closure,

Right around some of that.

And I mean,

I would imagine the different people,

And this has to play a big part in it too,

In the sense that,

You know,

You,

Part of the healing process is you've got the trauma and you're working on completing that event.

But the other part is building some sort of mental resilience of becoming more efficient as how you process life changes,

Right?

I would imagine that that would be part of it.

I mean,

Not everybody's equal when it comes to different changes,

Right?

Like certain people will get more stressed out by things that arbitrarily are not as stressful for somebody who has had different experience.

Like what do you have to say basically in regards to that?

Conventionally speaking,

You are correct.

What we're finding out with the work that we've been doing and that we've been perfecting and researching the last couple of years is that healing from trauma may not be as difficult as we have built it up to be.

That trauma may not be as permanent as we have scared ourselves into believing.

Interesting.

And we maybe have a greater capacity or certainly much more robustness to handle that situation and to see ourselves on the other side of it.

So what we've found is that through a procedure of duplication of the elements that make up a cognition,

Right?

So the things that can make up an experience are the four ways that your brain categorizes information or neuro tags an experience.

And everything that's ever happened to us or everything that we'd ever think about is tagged with an image,

A thought,

An emotion,

Or a body sensation.

Okay?

So all memories- So an image,

Some sort of linguistic- So some sort of mental picture- Mental picture.

A thought,

Which is self-talking,

Self-commentary,

An emotion,

Which is a state of being,

And some sort of body sensation.

Body sensation,

Is that one of your senses,

Like smell or like- It could be gross sensations,

But it could also be subtle body sensations or felt senses,

A feeling in the tummy,

A tightness in the chest,

A fluttering in the heart or a tightness in the throat or something like that,

Right?

Some sort of physiological response.

There's something that goes along with that.

So every memory is tagged with those four elements,

Anything you can remember.

So if we make it something really simple and say,

You know,

Think of an ice cream cone.

Well,

Immediately you're going to have some prototypical picture of an ice cream cone pop in your mind.

You can't stop that.

You've got some thought about an ice cream cone,

Which is,

Wow,

That sounds great.

Or I got sick on my last one,

Or I can't have one because I'm watching my- Whatever is the most relevant to you,

Right?

You're going to have some sort of commentary.

It'll be there with ice cream cone.

And then you're going to have some sort of state of being,

Like it'll either make you happy or you'll smile or you'll frown because you got sick on it,

Or there'll be some sort of state of being shift.

So how all four of those exist for each memory?

With everything.

With everything.

All of consciousness is tagged with an image,

Thought,

Emotion,

Or body sensation.

Wow.

And ice cream cone,

Body sensation.

You may- Like a cold on your tongue or something like that.

You could open up,

You could salivate more,

You could change your posture,

You could lean in,

You could lean away.

Something's going to happen.

Wow,

Interesting.

So with any event,

Same exact thing.

So if I said,

Hey,

Think of something,

You have a really gorgeous gratitude page on your social media,

Right?

So think of a positive event that's happened in the last 24 hours.

Just let me know when you've got it.

Got one in mind?

Yeah.

Okay,

Cool.

So put your attention on that event.

What do you see in your mind?

What's there?

I'm going to see a picture immediately of where I was.

Okay,

Perfect.

What's your thought in regards to that picture in your mind?

What's your self-talk about that?

Like it was pleasant.

There you go.

Okay,

Good.

What's the emotional quality when you feel back into that event?

Relaxed,

Peaceful.

Relaxed,

Good.

And where do you feel that relaxation in your body?

I would say probably like my lungs,

Diaphragm.

I just feel very relaxed.

I feel I can breathe very deeply.

All right,

There you go.

Like I'm not tight in my chest.

Exactly.

Okay,

Cool.

So- That's interesting.

Yeah.

So let's try it with something else.

So think of something,

This will be a little harder for you,

But I know you can do it.

Think of something irritating,

Slightly challenging,

Something you endured that wasn't so fun.

Oh,

That'll be easy.

This week's been crazy.

Okay,

So pick an event.

So pick one.

Got it.

Yeah.

Okay,

Good.

And then sort of grab a snapshot of that moment in your mind of where like,

Okay,

That's when it really culminated to be when it was challenging for me.

Yeah.

Got it?

Okay,

Hold that.

What picture is there?

What do you see?

I see where I was when I felt that.

Okay.

I saw where I was in.

Perfect.

Okay,

Excellent.

All right,

Good.

What's your thought in that frozen moment that you took?

This is hopeless.

Okay,

Perfect.

Good.

You're doing great.

Good.

What's the emotion?

What's the state of being in that frozen moment?

Oh,

Definitely anger.

I was super frustrated.

Anger?

Good.

And where are you feeling the body?

In the chest,

Tight chest.

Okay,

Good.

Everything we've ever gone through is tagged with those four elements.

Wow,

That's crazy.

So we call those the four awarenesses.

You got your own hashtags in your own mind pretty much,

But they're- They're hashtagged.

Yeah,

They're hashtagged.

Wow.

That's exactly what's going on.

So when we duplicate those elements- What do you mean when you say duplicate?

So we want to recreate those elements again in consciousness.

They're not happening.

Oh,

God.

Like how we just did now.

We're presenting them back into our- Yeah.

And if I were working with you,

I would go a little bit further and I would say,

See what you saw then.

Hear what you were hearing then.

Feel what you were feeling then and notice what you were noticing in that moment.

Include yourself in the scene.

Let me know when it's very vivid for you.

Then at some point I'll say,

Is it a movie or a picture?

And you'll say that it's a movie for instance.

And I'll say,

Great.

I want you to freeze it.

Hold it.

Keep it perfectly still.

And then this is the duplicative moment.

I'm going to ask you about the elements of that frozen moment.

If we're working on someone's trauma,

The worst moment of that trauma,

The most intense moment should represent the moment when their psyche checked out.

Gotcha.

That should be the threshold in which their mind said,

I'm done.

I'm out.

So if we can duplicate that moment,

Because we can't reenact the moment.

We don't want to do that,

But we can duplicate the elements that make it up.

By finding those tags,

Pretty much.

And the closer we are to duplicating that moment,

Okay,

Then the greater success we have in allowing that charge to dissipate and to dissolve.

So okay.

My first question is when you duplicate a moment like that,

Obviously you're trying to kind of readdress it so it can be completed.

That's the whole idea,

Right?

Yes.

What do you,

I mean,

The first reaction of somebody,

Let's say hearing that,

That's never tried something like this would be like,

Wait a minute,

I don't want to go back there.

I don't want to duplicate.

Which is why it stayed stuck.

Because the natural human response is I'm not going to go back and let that finish.

Right?

We have a natural trepidation for that.

So this goes back to a very old psychological principle that was really being discovered right around the late 1940s.

The reason why I can tell you that is there's a very important book that a lot of people have read who were in the human potential world and the book is called Man's Search for Meaning.

It's by Viktor Frankl.

And his logo therapy is really based on what we call paradoxical intention.

So the layman's term for that is reverse psychology.

So he was the one that discovered that if he wanted to help his patient who had a stutter,

He would ask him to intentionally stutter.

And in doing so,

When his client would try to intentionally stutter,

He could speak clearly.

We joke about this a lot,

But if I say,

Think of a pink elephant,

It has the command or the instruction in it of pink elephant.

So you can't not think of one.

So this is what we call paradoxical intention.

It's going against the grain of what we would normally expect.

And what's happening in that moment when you try to stutter,

You're trying to duplicate stuttering.

So remember what I told you.

In the moment of duplication,

The thing that is charged,

The thing that's stuck on loop,

The thing that has too much importance in it will begin to dissolve.

Yeah,

Exactly.

So this is just a feature of consciousness.

It's like a consciousness hiccup,

Basically.

A hiccup is something that never got breathed through.

Every time I have a hiccup,

The way I always get rid of them is by slowing down my breathing and just letting it,

And then focusing on the breathing.

So I think what I'm getting,

At least my interpretation of this,

Is that it's like a mental hiccup that we keep glossing over until you go back and look at it again and recreate it in a sense and allow it to dissolve.

And we do that in a controlled way.

We do that in a very important way.

And one of the unique things about the way we work and the way we train other people how to work is that when we're in this duplication phase,

We're not engaging the narrative and we're not engaging the story about the trauma.

We are only trying to duplicate the elements that make it up.

All we need is a little bit of context.

We don't need the narrative.

We don't need the story.

We don't need to know what happened.

We don't even know what you think about it.

The thinking that you did on top of that that made you spin into that loop.

Correct.

So people's emotional charge can add more drama onto trauma.

Yeah,

It's like their self-reflecting reaction onto that feeling.

So all we need is the context,

Okay?

And then we need to duplicate those four elements.

And then that's it.

And so it's able to actually dissolve.

And to talk about duplication one more,

Because this is kind of a tricky concept for some people.

You can play with this sometime.

We all get a song stuck in our head.

You get an annoying song in your head.

And go play with this.

Intentionally,

Go find that song on YouTube or something.

Listen to it from beginning to end,

Mindfully,

And it won't be in your head anymore.

Wow,

Really?

That's one way of getting rid of it.

Really?

So again,

Why does that work?

Why did that happen?

Okay,

I got to tell you a little bit.

I got to build it up.

Because in my mind,

It's like,

Wouldn't that reinforce it?

Like,

Okay,

If something's going on and it's looping,

It's looping,

And you go listen to it,

That would only make it stronger.

That would enforce the habit.

Again,

Paradoxical intention,

Right?

It's a paradox.

It doesn't seem like it would be,

That's the way it would work.

But remember the stuttering scenario,

Right?

So let me build up a situation,

See if I can't describe it a little bit.

Yeah.

Let's say that for lunch,

I'm really craving chipotle.

Like,

I got to go there.

I really want a burrito.

Okay.

And I've built up some emotional charge of desire.

Yeah,

You got that picture in your mind.

I got it in there.

I'm hungry.

I'm salivating.

So how am I going to handle this charge that I've built,

This desire,

This hunger,

This need for this kind of lunch?

Well,

The easiest thing to do is to drive to chipotle and have it.

Well,

The moment I have it,

I no longer desire it.

The age-old existential problem,

Right?

So there you go.

So the moment I get it,

I'm not desiring it anymore.

Now,

I may trade for some other desire,

But the way to dissolve that is a perfect duplication of my desire,

Right?

So I had this thing going on where I really wanted this,

And then actually having it is a perfect duplication.

So I no longer desire chipotle because I'm having it.

It's in my mouth.

Interesting.

Okay.

So that's one way.

But that doesn't happen for everything.

The second way that charge can dissolve through duplication through duplication is to authentically change my mind about what it was I thought I wanted.

So I'm driving to get my chipotle,

And I realize,

I don't want chipotle.

I want sushi.

What was I thinking?

No,

I really didn't want that.

I'm actually really wanting sushi,

And I change.

Now the desire has shifted.

So if I authentically want sushi,

Guess what?

I'm no longer desiring chipotle.

It dissolved away.

Yeah,

In fact,

Either you complete the desire or you change the desire.

Okay.

Third way is to duplicate the four elements that make up that psycho-emotional stuckness,

The images,

Thoughts,

Emotions,

And body sensations.

The closest I can get in my mind to duplicating the images about what I want,

The thoughts about how I want it,

The emotions that are going on with that,

And the body sensations,

My desire for the chipotle will start to drain out.

Then I'll be left in a position where if I want to go get it,

I can go get it.

If I don't go get it,

I'll be okay.

Okay,

Let's say you're duplicating it though.

Let's say you have the desire already.

You have the image of the chipotle in your mind.

It's already in a sense in your mind already.

From that point where you're.

.

.

If I can articulate this question correctly,

When you're duplicating the image,

Let's say the third thing that we talked about where you're trying to duplicate the state and all those four things,

Isn't that already happening in your mind?

You already have the picture.

You're already salivating.

You're already.

.

.

You would think,

But for most of us,

And this is something we could play with together if you want,

Most of us have a bias to one or two of the elements and we have a denial or a disowning of another one or two of the elements.

So some people will be very visual and there'll be lots of mental pictures and they'll have body sensations,

But if you ask them about emotions or thoughts,

They get a little stuck.

Oh,

I see.

Or they're really long on thoughts,

But images are a little fuzzy.

They're completely out of touch with their body and they don't have the vocabulary to talk about the emotions.

If they mindfully talk about the emotions,

They're going to be very out of touch to their own memory.

No!

Yes.

And.

.

.

Uh.

.

.

Images are a little fuzzy,

They're completely out of touch with their body,

And they don't have the vocabulary to talk about the emotions.

If they mindfully then recreate those four,

All four of those elements,

That's almost like having.

.

.

And the key is all four elements.

I see,

Because your desire is not always all four,

It might be just visual or whatever.

So what we're finding is it is,

What's important is the duplication of all four of the constituents of consciousness.

All four elements have to be duplicated.

If you duplicate one,

Two,

Or three of the elements,

You'll get partial duplication.

Some of the charge will come off,

But not all of it.

So with a lot of traditional psychotherapies,

For instance,

They're getting okay success because of a lot of partial duplications,

But never full duplications.

Yeah,

They stick in the linguistic side of things maybe,

Or.

.

.

So cognitive behavior will always be primarily about thoughts and rationalizations.

There'll be an ignorance,

Literally,

Of body sensations.

Very little on emotions,

Maybe not so much on images.

If you go to psychoanalysis,

It'll be heavy on long on emotions.

Pretty strong on images.

Yeah,

The person laying on the bench,

How do you feel pretty much?

Right,

Yeah.

But thoughts and body sensations might be left out.

So what we're finding is the rapidity and the strength of the change and the transformation we see in the people we're helping,

We're attributing that to a very careful duplication of all four elements in the moment.

Interesting.

Okay,

And so that seems to be what drains it away.

Now what about fears?

Okay,

I'm following on the Chipotle thing,

And I get how you've got this desire.

You can either change your desire,

You can either satiate your desire,

Or you can recreate the full conscious representation of that desire,

And then you're complete with that experience.

And from there you can choose or not.

I get that with the desire.

But now with the thing that I'm not there yet with fear,

You're running away from something,

Whereas desire feels like that makes sense because you're chasing something.

So how does it work with fear in the sense of,

Let's say,

The third one where you're recreating it,

Or let's say even the first one where you're,

Here's my fear,

They say,

Okay,

You're afraid of doing this?

I guess you hear that anyway.

Because the extra step that I didn't mention as I was trying to keep it simple is that when we do these procedures,

We duplicate the charge side,

But we also anchor in the here and now.

So there's an extra maneuver at the end of the process where we allow the person's psyche to integrate into here and now present time awareness.

So there's an extra thing here.

I was trying to keep it a little bit simple.

I'll do my best.

But for anybody who heard this in college when they were in their psychology classes,

There's a principle of psychology called cognitive dissonance.

And basically what it means is that you can't hold two inconsistent cognitions at the same time.

So we have an exploitation of that principle of psychology where right at the moment when you have it most perfectly frozen and duplicated,

We ask you to do a very simple,

Almost silly seeming cognitive task which is rooted in the here and now.

The brain has to decide present time awareness or this thing.

And present time awareness will always win out.

So what happens in that moment,

And now I'll trace back to something I mentioned before,

In that moment of present time awareness,

Literally the awareness of I am now here,

The brain goes,

Oh we're done.

It finishes it.

It closes the loop and it's no longer on this repetitious destructive cycle.

You see what I'm saying?

Interesting.

Yeah.

Okay.

So remember- You bring it to the crossroads and then you make it choose the present.

Yeah.

Because last time this happened,

In real time,

The psyche checked out.

So now we've come up to the cusp of where it was before and now there's a recognition of,

Oh,

I'm now,

This is now,

I'm here.

Wow.

This is what's real.

In that moment,

That's when we short circuit the system and the brain goes,

Oh,

That's just a memory.

That's just something that happened to me,

But it's not me.

And this is the important part about trauma.

When we have an integration of someone's trauma,

That's what's happening.

They don't forget the event.

They don't suddenly believe that the event didn't happen or cause some sort of distress for them.

It doesn't have the charge anymore.

It doesn't have the charge anymore and they are free from what that meant to them.

They're no longer identified with it.

They understand this is something that happened to me,

But it is not me.

They have the information,

But it doesn't have the charge and the constant physiological response.

It can no longer affect them in a psycho-emotional way.

Wow.

That's fascinating.

Yeah.

And how long you've been doing that for?

I've been studying this work for about five years.

I was introduced to it when I was leaving the college system where I taught a course on the psychology of consciousness and mature ego development.

And I got introduced to this right at the tail end of my tenure doing that.

And it was the best stuff I'd ever seen.

It was the embodied application of the theory that I had been teaching.

And this was an applied methodology that actually brought about the change that it promised it was going to bring.

And this was in Europe,

Right?

Last time I talked to you about this,

Didn't you learn about it from some guy that he was- Yeah,

He's a Yugoslavian psychologist.

That's right.

Zivarad Slavinski.

But I was introduced to it by my mentor Satyan Raja,

Who's from Vancouver.

So I studied with Satyan for the better part of about three and a half years.

And then I got to the point where I wanted to teach other practitioners how to do this.

So I flew to Belgrade.

I studied with Zivarad personally.

And I'm now one of his certified trainers where I can show other individuals how to apply these techniques in their human potential practices and that sort of thing.

So we train other therapists,

We train other coaches,

We train other counselors how to apply these types of methodologies so they can get their clients unstuck around either negative experiences,

Problems,

Or goals.

What is the training like?

I mean,

Let's say somebody wanted to add this to their work,

Whatever kind of work that they are in,

In healing,

In medicine,

Whatever.

How long is the program?

What are the results like?

What kind of stories have you that you can share?

Yeah,

So we've got two phases.

We can train people in individual processes.

And so the different protocols have different outcomes that are possible for them.

So we have a trauma integration process,

Which I've been loosely talking about here.

We have some protocols that work specifically with identities and integrating identities that we are falsely attached to and leaving ourselves in a spiritually awakened state of freedom.

We can work with any kind of experiences,

Any kind of problems,

And also the actualization of goals.

So there's about 24 different protocols.

And people can learn those individually if they wish.

And we have trainings for those,

Which are usually somewhere around a two-day training over a weekend that we do as a teleconference.

And our structure is to.

.

.

So they could be pretty much anywhere.

It's all virtual.

Yeah.

And we have been training people internationally with this.

So the structure of training is always the same.

There is some theoretical background so they understand the principles that we're talking about.

We've introduced some of that here.

And then the structure is to demonstrate one,

Which is usually by me or one of the other certified trainers.

Then they do one and then they exchange one with the other members of the people on the training call.

So this allows for a rapid integration of the methodology because they get to see one done,

Then they have one done on themselves,

And then they have to immediately then apply it.

All three ways of learning,

Pretty much.

All three ways of learning.

And then we have a Q&A afterwards.

So that's one phase is to learn the processes one at a time.

We also have a silogea methodology coaching program,

Which is a full six-month immersion,

Where they learn not only all these integrative protocols that I'm speaking about,

But they also learn the theory that supports it all,

Which is integral theory.

So it's the mixture of an immersion in integral theory and integral ideology and integral perspective taking,

And also learning how to use the methodology in a powerful way so they can serve their clients.

What's integral theory?

I think I remember learning a little bit about it,

And it was very interesting,

But I'm having a hard time telling you what it was.

It's a theory of everything.

There's an American philosopher who's still with us,

Thank goodness,

By the name of Ken Wilber.

And he's been writing seminal books for the better part of 30 years now on integral consciousness and integral theory.

And so basically it is the honoring of as many perspectives as possible when looking at a particular problem or situation.

So there's always the inside and outside of the individual and the collective.

So he's got this quadrant model that we can basically use as a lens to look at phenomena through.

And what it does is it honors the main features of existence,

Which are arts,

Morals,

And sciences,

Or the exterior,

The interior,

The cultural point of view,

And the environmental.

So like a patient,

Let's say,

Or somebody comes to you and you're looking at them through all four of these lenses to draw customized,

Basically,

Solutions.

Precisely.

So what's different here is,

Say,

Someone's coming to us and they say,

You know,

I'm suffering from depression.

Well,

If I was only a neuroscientist,

Then I'd say,

Oh,

Well,

You've got lower levels of dopamine than most individuals.

And so we need to lift that serotonin or dopamine levels higher.

And so what we need to do is give you some medication.

So we're going to give you this serotonin reuptake inhibitor and your serotonin levels are going to come up and you're going to feel better.

Aren't you glad?

Off you go.

But what that does is that leaves out the interior meaninglessness that that person is experiencing.

The etiology of why they would feel hopeless.

It's leaving out the entire cultural definition of where we draw the line in the sand and say,

Well,

This is depression and this isn't.

And it's leaving out all the environmental factors that may be playing a role in terms of where you live,

What's happening around you,

These sorts of things.

So we want to say,

OK,

Maybe the serotonin levels are low,

But let's look at what is the framework that everything looks hopeless.

Why is there a meaninglessness?

What's going on inside with how you make sense of the world?

What's going on with your worldview that's playing into this?

What's going on relationally and culturally that's feeding into this?

And are there any environmental influencers here?

OK,

So all that has to be taken into consideration.

Then,

As long as we honor all four of those domains,

Then it's OK to give medication as long as we do it in conjunction with reframing and restructuring the meaning-making system.

And it's OK to do that as long as we look at the relational,

Cultural,

And family systems that influence it.

And we need to pay attention to what's going on environmentally because where you live has a lot to do with how you look at the world.

So we have to honor all those domains at once.

When we do that,

We get greater success,

We get faster success,

We get more permanent healing,

We get more permanent change.

OK,

So I totally agree.

I'm 100% agree.

But my question would be,

How do you prioritize then?

Let's say you take in all these different aspects of a person,

Right?

Then how do you make the next decision?

What do you say,

OK,

You know what?

In this case,

I'm going to go a little bit stronger with the medical side or I'm going to go,

We're going to really,

You know,

Like,

I guess maybe there's no simple answer to that.

For us,

We don't prioritize it.

We only prioritize it.

We understand they all co-arise at the same time.

OK.

Yeah,

So we're not championing one over the other because you can find any discipline where they're going to say,

No,

That's the only thing to look at.

Right,

Right.

OK,

So if you talk to a neurobiologist,

They're going to say it's the serotonin.

If you talk to a psychologist,

They're going to say it's the meaning-making system.

Yeah.

If you talk to a social worker,

They're going to tell you it's the cultural,

It's the cultural landscape that they're in and what's going on with their family.

And if you talk to a sociologist,

They're going to say,

Well,

It's their geographical location and the,

You know,

Their access to provisions and certain rights and rituals.

So every one of those domains is right.

Right.

Yeah.

OK.

But they're all right in a way where they're not all 100% right and they're not all 100% wrong.

So what we find is that rapid shift or an acceleration of consciousness happens when we cross-train those areas.

So maybe the best analogy is it's like P90X.

It's like the P90X version of psychology.

You don't choose in P90X which one to do the most.

The whole intention is to sort of scramble the system and do all of them.

So basically,

I'm guessing people have a lot more,

I don't want to call it homework,

But basically when somebody is being seen from that perspective and treated from that perspective,

Their treatment is going to be much more varied and much more,

Like they're going to have a lot more stuff going on to treat them.

Right?

Or,

I mean,

I'm guessing,

OK,

If we got to do a little bit of change in your environment,

We got to do some medicine,

We got to do a little bit of,

You know,

Cultural something.

You know,

I don't know what happens,

But as opposed to,

Let's say,

Just going to the neurologist where the guy's like,

Oh,

I'm going to do this.

Going to the neurologist where the guy's like,

OK,

Here's some meds and I see you.

Simple solution,

Quote unquote,

Simple.

But do you know what I mean?

Like if somebody is being taken into account with all these different perspectives,

Then I'm guessing that the treatment is a lot grander in scale?

It's just more holistic.

More holistic.

It's more holistic.

So I work with a lot of people who are very healthy people.

I don't work with the clinically struggling.

Yeah.

So if someone comes to me and they say,

Look,

You know,

I got something going on with my relationships and,

You know,

I'm really feeling kind of down and out and I've taken on some bad habits and,

You know,

I just don't feel good about the world.

I'm feeling a bit lost.

I don't have any mission.

OK,

So I'm interested in a couple things.

I'm interested in that value system that they have.

I'm interested in their meaning making system.

I'm interested in how they're talking to themselves.

Right?

That would all be the interior of them.

But I'm also interested in what kind of physical activity are you doing?

Are you getting outside?

What are you consuming?

What's your diet like?

What are you consuming in terms of information?

Are you getting enough sleep?

Right.

OK,

That's all the exterior part of that map.

And then I'm interested in what are your connections like?

Who supports you?

Who do you talk to?

Who are the people influencing you?

What kind of interactions are you having?

That's that whole relational part.

And then I also need to take into account what's happening around you.

Where do you live?

What sorts of things.

.

.

Culturally,

Socioeconomically.

.

.

Do you have a car?

Do you have money?

You know,

What's your neighborhood like?

Right.

You know,

These sorts of things.

So I factor in all of that.

And where it's lacking,

We got to shore it up.

And I don't want to over champion one of those domains more than another.

So again,

When we're cross training like that,

We're taking all that into consideration.

And then we've got a much more holistic approach to helping that person.

Fascinating.

I mean,

I'm sure you get some drastically quicker results than,

Let's say,

Traditional therapy.

We're seeing really,

We're seeing very fast results.

So specifically,

Our topic tonight is talking about trauma.

I've followed up with several hundred of the people that we've taken through this trauma integration.

I call them every couple of weeks.

I call them every couple months.

I call them every couple of years.

I'm now able to check in on people five years on now.

And when I call them,

I say to them,

How's it going with that?

We worked on this thing.

I repeat back to them exactly what it is that occurred to them in a very stark way.

And they always tell me the same thing.

Wesley,

It's a part of me,

But it doesn't define me anymore.

I am no longer a slave to that.

I am free.

Okay,

Well,

This happened.

Yes,

It happened.

It just feels like something.

You kind of trigger it basically.

I try to trigger them.

I can't do it.

They tell me they're fine.

They've gone on to other problems.

They got other things.

But that thing has remains resolved.

So we're seeing very,

Very strong success rates with that.

We're seeing about 80 to 85% success rate in whatever we choose to integrate is staying stable as an integration.

We're not seeing relapses.

We're not having people come back in.

And how long these people see you for?

Like,

Let's say,

Okay,

Let's pick something serious.

Like somebody experienced it.

It's one session.

It doesn't matter what you're going to tell me.

One session.

These trauma integrations that we're talking about happen in one session.

Really?

Yeah.

And it doesn't matter what the trauma is.

So we've worked with veterans.

And by the way,

We offer free trauma integration sessions to veterans.

Any type of first responder professional.

That's really awesome.

Yeah.

We offer complimentary sessions to those individuals.

So we've helped those people out.

I've had military personnel.

I've had first responders.

We've got these people.

They're fine.

They've gotten back to what they were needing to do.

Worked with a lot of people who've had sexual abuse,

Physical abuse,

Emotional abuse.

And when we talk to them again,

They remain free around that which we worked on the integration with.

And it doesn't matter if it's incest.

It doesn't matter if it's sexual violation.

It doesn't matter if it's long-term emotional abuse.

We're seeing the same type of result.

So when we do these trauma integrations,

We don't want people uncomfortable for a very long period of time.

We understand we're duplicating the very thing they don't want to re-experience.

So people are uncomfortable for maybe 30 to 45 seconds.

That's it.

After that,

It rapidly dissipates and it starts to dissolve out like we talked about.

And so people are fine.

And again,

It's happening because we've built up this culture of fear around trauma.

We're dancing around it on eggshells and we're treating like,

Oh,

Yeah.

And we're never actually getting.

Yeah,

We're never really getting to it.

And so now we're afraid to get to it.

And so we never really get there.

So humans are far more robust than we're giving ourselves credit for right now.

And we can handle a certain amount of a duplication of these elements.

And then we can allow people to have their resolution.

You know,

You mentioned something that kind of made me think a little bit,

Which is the idea of us being more robust.

And I really wonder,

Do you think that our generations now with everything that's going on socio economically,

Culturally,

Technologically,

That it's playing to that fear in the sense of and encouraging us to be less robust in the sense that not that it's changing our inherent capability,

But how we manifest in our ability to handle trauma because of everything that's going on.

You know,

Like you look at,

For example,

People,

I don't know,

Like my great grandfather or my grandparents,

They were like in World War Two or whatever.

It's like they got their houses bombed.

They got just massive amount of loss and change and trauma.

And I'm sure they had issues,

Too.

But it's like even people back in the day when they were dealing with all kinds of problems,

It seems like our generation now,

The younger generation,

Because of the,

In my opinion,

Maybe I'm wrong,

But maybe the technological comforts and all these things that are happening and the,

I don't know exactly what it is,

But I'll just leave it up to you.

You can answer it.

There is a cultural sensitivity that we are valuing right now.

Where we're looking for sensitivity,

We are looking for a kind of acknowledgement.

We're looking for a kind of embrace around phenomena happening.

And right now in North America,

That's pretty popular right now.

Everyone's sensitive.

Everyone has needs.

Everybody should be attended to in a direct and unique way specific to them.

And there is a lot of truth to that.

And that is something that has been a long time coming and we should be honoring and we should be feeling out the parameters of that.

But with every bit of good news comes a little bit of bad news.

And the other side of that is we can be in a bubble.

We can be a little bit too careful.

And with too much consensus,

With too much sensitivity,

With too much being protective and careful,

Too much helicoptering,

We can not get anything done.

We can't move forward.

We're so busy attending to this strong emotional need and we can get very stuck.

And that's where we are right now.

We're a little bit stuck.

The human organism is ridiculously robust.

We just are not treating ourselves right now as if we are as robust as we are.

There are countless historical references that you and I can point to that can obviously show us that this robustness is indeed true.

And there's also the fact that we're all here and alive right now.

There's 70,

000 years of ancestry and experience that proves that that robustness is indeed inherent and alive and well.

We wouldn't be here without it.

And terrible things can befall a person.

And remarkable things can happen as a progression from those terrible things.

Humans are remarkable in their plasticity.

Yeah,

They say that your wounds are your greatest gifts,

To be able to turn something.

A lot of the great things that have happened in some sense have been sourced from some of the greatest pains,

Too,

Which is a testament to what we were talking about.

Limitations are only limitations from one of those perspectives we were talking about earlier.

And a lot of times those are the things that actually mark you.

They are the things that make you unique.

It is true the wound and the gift are reciprocal of each other.

We're just in a phase of consciousness right now,

Societally,

Where we think that all wounds are bad,

All abuses are terrible and should be punished.

And this is risky for me to say,

But this is what's going on right now.

And there is a place beyond what people are defining as atrocities.

There is a further understanding.

Human consciousness reaches further than that,

And it can be taken in an even broader,

More compassionate perspective.

And that's just something people have to grow into.

And my colleagues and myself,

We're willing to be the demonstration of what it looks like to try to live from there and to try to conduct ourselves from that place,

Which is the further reaches of consciousness.

And we are trying to heal people with that intention,

Holding that kind of space for that.

And we'll continue to do that as guides and as mentors and as people who are willing to take the torch and say,

This is what it looks like.

There is a place beyond this.

And so when you are satisfied that you've been attended to,

Or all your needs have been met,

Or you've been able to voice yourself,

Or you've been able to have enough people acknowledge your sensitivities,

You will want something else beyond that.

That is not the end game.

Something moves beyond that.

Consciousness is much more wide and broad than that.

Yeah,

It's not just trying to fill the hole.

It's expanding and trying to grow.

That's correct.

So we're training people how to hold that perspective.

We are wanting to,

With our one-to-one clients,

Show them what those places look like so they can conduct themselves and show up in a much greater capacity.

So do you do a lot of shifting?

When somebody's coming in for trauma,

Is there also after that sensitivity or that hole has been filled,

Let's say,

Then is there a shift to focusing on that growth in the future and the purpose,

The sense of alignment with something fulfilling in the sense that that overshadows?

Because sometimes too,

Once you've filled a trauma up,

And let's say you leave it at that,

And there's just empty space,

It's easy for that empty space to get filled up again with other nonsense,

Right?

Yep,

People can fill it up again.

And we do our best to encourage them after so many cleanups.

That was an incomplete thought,

But something more important came.

My teacher is very fond of saying to me,

You need to be healed enough.

You're never going to heal everything.

You can't even remember it all.

So the goal here is not to try to heal everything and pretend as if you are a victim and you are broken.

We should be striving to be healed enough,

Enough that we can take ourselves up and give our deepest gifts.

That's what's important.

Be healed enough that you can give your deepest gift.

And that will not include all of it.

And it doesn't need to.

Doesn't need to.

Life is in the action,

Right?

It's in the movement of things.

It would go on forever.

And even if you could somehow historically clean up everything,

Something's just going to happen tomorrow afternoon.

That is an endless hungry ghost.

What do you say about,

Like when you have a particular experience,

Let's say a traumatic experience,

An emotional thing,

What I find is also that it creates layers and triggers.

For example,

I'll give you a quick story that just reminded me of.

I was out working and I get paid cash for what a right I was doing here.

And so I was in a different part of town.

I never was before.

And I went to go get some Mexican food and the cash was in an envelope.

And I was just being,

I was tired late at night,

Being stupid.

I even said the word stupid.

Now I left my envelope in the car and I left my car on lock two.

And so I come back and my envelope was gone.

Now,

Look,

At the time I have a ton of money in my account.

There's no problem with that.

But when I saw that that envelope was stolen,

I like,

Even now just thinking about it,

Like I get that rage.

I got that rage.

And as I was working on with another good friend of mine,

Lee,

Who does the emotion code,

We kind of backtracked and backtracked.

And I found this memory of being a little kid where I was waiting for the bus.

It was like in sixth grade.

And I left my backpack,

Which is like this brand new leather backpack my mom got for me and all this stuff.

And I went to go in the video game store.

And I don't know what I was thinking,

But I left my backpack.

I was like,

Oh,

Nobody's going to take it.

People are good natured,

Whatever.

So I came back literally when the bus was pulling away,

My backpack was gone and I felt so stupid.

And that was the word that I found was stupid was a trigger.

So anyway,

Long story short,

What that in a microcosm taught me was that there's these things that happen,

Let's say as a kid,

You know,

Whatever these,

These wounded,

These little wounds that then start to mirror each other and create like relapses as we go.

And then pretty soon,

Let's say,

Let's say a week later,

Something happens that triggers that old experience.

And then it creates another layer.

And then that now that's the fresh layer,

Then something to have,

You know,

So you have,

By the time you're like,

You know,

30,

40,

50,

Whatever,

You got this one experience.

That's really kind of like a column of,

Of things that have been mirrored throughout time.

So my question is to kind of now circle back to what I wanted to ask you,

Which is if you go back to,

Let's say one of those original experiences that you can find and you can dig up and you,

You do this trauma release,

Do you find that there's a relationship to other triggers?

Like let's say whatever,

Somebody clears a trauma that happened,

And then now they notice,

Hey,

You know what,

By the way,

I also don't seem to get in as many arguments with my girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever,

You know,

Like about XYZ.

Like,

Do you notice that there's a generalizing effect or is it more.

.

.

I have a different metaphor,

But I can speak to it.

So the closer we get to a root event or what I call a ground zero event,

Everything layered on top of that will come down with the dissolution of that root event.

So anything on that tree,

Anything on that branch will come down with it.

Okay.

So the more we can get to where we're working with a core event of some sort,

Anything that was developed on that branch will collapse with it.

Okay.

So we don't need to go limb by limb,

Leaf by leaf.

We can actually go at the root event.

And when you take it out at the root event,

Everything that was related to it or stacked on top of it,

Will come down with it.

That's what we've seen.

And do you find like when somebody comes in,

You know,

Let's say to do a trauma release,

That you have to like do a little bit of digging?

Like do you go through a process of like basically questioning them and saying,

Okay,

This is actually what's really going on.

And you heal that moment or do you go with what they initially came with?

Most people who are coming in and saying,

Listen,

You know,

I've got this life event that I can't get past.

We know exactly what it is.

And we're able to go right after it.

Sometimes when I'm working with other people who have,

You know,

Different sets of goals and trauma isn't the first thing that comes up,

We have to go digging around for it.

But we also have what I've come to call a core charge assessment.

So we actually created an assessment tool.

It's an old psychoanalytic tool that helps us really get to the root of at least three core events in somebody's life that would represent when things started to take that different trajectory.

So we do have an assessment for that.

And sometimes I need to use it again.

If somebody is coming in and they know what it is,

Right.

They know there was a violation.

They know there was an accident.

They know there was a catastrophe.

You know,

They,

They understand,

They know there's a phobia,

This sort of thing.

So,

But with the situations where somebody can't pinpoint it,

Then we do have a generalized anxiety or something like that.

So they,

That's what you would have more of a,

An assessment situation.

Yeah.

Or sometimes we know something's blocking them and they can't quite articulate it.

So we go rooting around and try to find out what was that core event that may represent that.

Rarely is that again,

A trauma,

But sometimes it is a,

It's a critical moment in their upbringing that started to set a trajectory for their life experiences,

Which I wouldn't necessarily put in the category of a trauma.

Yeah.

I was going to say like,

What,

What is trauma?

Like,

How do you,

How would you define that?

Because I mean,

That's to some degree relative,

Right?

Yeah.

Ask me tomorrow and I'll say something different,

But the thing that's coming up right now is that I think an easy way to define trauma without really getting bogged down into it would be,

It's a moment in time when a little part of you died.

It's,

Or it's another moment in time.

Which you are we talking about here?

What's that?

When we say you,

Which you are we talking about?

Like you as your inner child,

You as your ego,

You as your,

Because that's,

That's an interesting thought too.

It's a moment when,

It's a moment when the illusion of reality shatters.

Wow.

That's what it is.

It's when you had an expectation about how things were going to go and then it completely didn't go that way.

It shattered everything you were expecting to happen.

You know?

And again,

That,

That can take a lot of forms for a lot of people.

Would you say though,

That all trauma would fall under some sort of cognitive dissonance?

Some sort of dis,

You know,

Misalignment between what is and what is in my head.

And what is in my head.

Right.

Sure.

Absolutely.

And with a trauma it stays unresolved.

So what's unique about,

What's unique about traumas is that we can liken them back to an originating event.

So we don't see that with other types of conditions.

If somebody is suffering from depression,

You're not going to be able to trace it back to some moment when the depression started.

Depression is something that's generalized and episodic.

There's no defining moment of schizophrenia.

There's no defining moment of a phobia having been taken root.

What's interesting about trauma is we can almost always take it back to an originating event.

We know what happened.

Interesting.

We can speak about it.

We can speak about the irrationality of the moment.

That's not something we're always afforded with other types of conditions.

So with those people that have,

Let's say depression or generalized anxiety or phobias,

Has this proven to be effective?

Like how,

As people come to you?

Yeah.

So I don't work with clinical,

With people with clinical conditions.

I work with people who are struggling with limitations,

Disempowering beliefs,

Struggles,

Stresses,

Things like that.

Certainly people dealing with events in their life that they're having a hard time getting beyond.

And when we're working with those people,

We see the kind of success rates that I talked about.

We're seeing,

And I'm being really conservative here,

We're seeing 85% or more of them completely and fully integrated and moved beyond that which we worked on.

So we're seeing remarkable results in that way and we're keeping track of what's happening there.

People struggling with clinical depression,

Clinical levels of anxiety,

Schizophrenia,

Bipolar,

Things like that.

I've worked with those people,

But I insist that they continue to see their psychiatric professional or their specific psychologist so that they have a regular conventional regime that they're working through to continue to help them in whatever modality that therapist helps them with.

And I'm willing to discreetly go in and say,

Okay,

These are the moments where you're saying nobody's helped you reconcile this.

These are the moments you're saying you're still stuck around.

Then I come in and I work with them around those specific moments and clear that up.

And then I'll very arrogantly say I'm doing their conventional practitioner a favor.

But people come to me when everything else has not worked.

That's when I finally see people.

But if I know that they're struggling with some sort of clinical condition or they've been diagnosed with something,

It's a requirement for me to make sure that they continue to see that professional.

And I will augment that therapy.

With that person.

Yeah.

So if they're on medication for the depression,

They got to stay on that medication.

If they're seeing somebody for a personality disorder,

They've got to continue that regime with that individual.

So I don't claim that I can remove those clinical conditions.

But I can give people integration around defining life moments that they're having a difficult time accepting and integrating.

That I can do.

That's really powerful stuff,

Man.

I mean,

That's so fascinating.

When you have that cognitive dissonance,

When you have that split point,

Right?

The split point between reality as what happened and reality as what it was expecting in your mind,

It's like they mutually arise,

Those two things.

They just keep spinning.

That duality just keeps spinning in your mind.

And until you integrate it back to present moment,

You just are in that constant momentum,

That spin.

And it's really about just integrating those two things into the present moment.

It's just fascinating how simple it is,

Just talking about it in a sense.

And how complicated we make it out to be with all these heaviness to it.

What do you think is the biggest.

.

.

We talked about robustness.

We talked about our ability to integrate.

And there's certainly a level of skill involved here too,

To be able to integrate yourself back through these difficult experiences.

Today,

What do you think the biggest obstacle or barrier to our own power,

Our own consciousness,

Our own power to supersede these situations?

What do you think the biggest barrier is today?

It's kind of an open-ended question.

Yeah,

I know.

I got a risky answer coming up.

Go for it.

It's the insistence of specialness.

It is finding a certain identity,

A certain kind of specialness in victimhood.

That's not going to go over well with some people when they hear this,

But that's what's going on.

There's an exaltation of victimhood right now.

There's a victim contest going on.

What do you think caused that though?

That reminds me of this paper I wrote way back in freaking high school about Nietzsche and the change from the Greco-Roman ideals into the Judeo-Christian ones and how we exalt the weak and all this stuff.

But what do you think is contributing to that?

It has to do with levels of consciousness.

Things move from magic to mythic to rational to relational to integral consciousness.

I know that's a lot of big words,

But basically what it's saying is that our value system shifts and changes.

So when our worldview works for us,

We stay in that worldview.

When that worldview starts to exhaust its capacity to answer our most pressing questions,

Then we go looking for the next higher worldview.

When we're real little,

We can get by with a magical worldview.

We can have imaginary friends.

We can close our eyes real hard and hope that somebody will go away.

We can think that we can command things around with our will and things like that.

We're kids.

We do that.

We have pretend play.

There's a lot of fantasy involved.

That same consciousness is evident in very primitive cultures where,

Okay,

The volcano is personally mad at our tribe and so we're gonna go.

.

.

Mythology and.

.

.

Yeah,

We're gonna go.

.

.

Chuck a fresh virgin in it and then we'll satisfy that particular god,

Right?

This magical belief.

And that eventually gives way to a more mythical viewpoint or a more fundamentalist viewpoint or a more membership-based type of viewpoint where you say,

Okay,

Well maybe I'm not magical,

But this deity,

This symbol is magical so I'll hand it over to them.

Selective magical.

And I'll say the right rites and chants and the right words to this omnipotent one and they'll do it on my behalf because I'm saying I surrender to you and say,

Oh well you can do it.

So we defer,

We pass off the magic to an omnipotent one.

And you know how that goes.

Everybody listening knows how that goes.

And then you wake up from that one day and you start taking on something more rational,

Something that you can make better predictions.

You start thinking things through.

You start understanding cause and effect and you start getting a bit more skeptical.

And along with that comes a greater capacity for prediction and it works better and so you start to have a more rational reasoning outlook and viewpoint.

And that works pretty well,

But that brings about a certain type of.

.

.

Lack of purpose or meaning or.

.

.

It can do that.

It can bring a lack of purpose and meaning.

I was thinking more that it can become oppressive.

How so?

Well,

It creates the haves and the have-nots.

You know,

It's they have it and we don't.

You know,

Or yeah that's really great but look at all the destruction it's creating.

You know,

Or yeah that was a great achievement but at what cost?

Right.

We start weighing those things out.

We start getting much more environmentally minded,

Much more ecologically minded.

Right.

So we started saying,

Well yeah all that industry was really awesome but look what it's done to the ecosystem.

You know,

Or yeah you made a lot of money but at the cost of all these the cost of all these citizens and what about them?

You know,

We start questioning the motives.

We start wondering,

We start putting everything in a relative perspective and that's that next relational relativistic level of consciousness where you start questioning all of that.

And you start saying,

Well wait a minute.

How does it relate?

Things were equal but it's not equitable.

You know,

So this level of consciousness is beautiful and it's what I was referring to earlier.

You know,

And it's very sensitive and it's really it's relativistic and it's relational and it's very inclusive and it's very sensitive and that is much needed.

But it comes with it a dark side which is it has a horrible streak of narcissism in it.

And it never really gets anything done.

It wants to discuss.

It wants to recognize.

But there's never achieving of a goal.

It never really gets anywhere.

And so everything is heard but not everything is completed.

Nothing's acted upon.

And that's an important level.

And at some point the non-action of that will become apparent.

And there's also a lot of what we call performative contradictions in that way of thinking.

So I'll try to make sense of that really fast.

You know,

It's like some people say,

I just can't believe people who judge people.

Well,

You're making a judgment about judging people.

You know,

So that's what they call a performative contradiction.

So people can get caught up in that sort of thing.

Because they can't see that very last step.

That makes it personal.

Yeah.

Or they'll get stuck on.

.

.

My final viewpoint is correct and all hierarchies are terrible except for the hierarchical decision you just made that.

.

.

Yeah,

That compares to see what's your decision at the top.

So those are called performative contradictions.

And sooner or later that will dawn upon an individual that they're caught up in that.

And then that'll lead to a more integrative,

Holistic consciousness where you're able to see and honor all of the other levels I talked about,

Leave them where they are,

Feel no desire in you that you must change them and bring you along to where you are.

You bow to them and honor them as a colorful spectrum of consciousness that's needed at those levels at that time for that person.

And the best you can do on any given day is usher somebody through a transition period to the next healthier level of consciousness.

But that we can honor all those levels and we don't need to change them.

There's nothing wrong with them.

Whereas the other levels that I spoke about are all sort of in a competition with each other.

Or can find the.

.

.

They're all reactive to one another.

They're all reactive.

Yeah.

And so the integrative consciousness is no longer reactive to all that.

It's not reactive to all that.

It can honor the entire spectrum.

Got it.

And so we're stuck right now in this relativistic consciousness,

And that's going to be our fad for a little while longer.

And until people start realizing its inherent limitations,

Which they will,

We know that because we see it happen in individuals.

We just haven't seen it collectively yet.

So we're going to have to wait a couple of years.

Chronology will take care of it.

Years will take care of it eventually.

I'm in the business of trying to accelerate it for all the individuals that we help,

But we're going to have to wait.

So until we get there,

We're going to have to move through this.

And the best we can do is express ourselves at the healthiest capacity possible at the level that we're in.

So there's healthy and unhealthy virtues to each level of consciousness.

And the best we can do is encourage people to conduct themselves from the healthiest possible expression that they can.

That's what we're hoping for.

That sounds like a good barometer for pretty much,

I mean,

Because then you get out of the comparing and the reaction to each one.

You just treat each person as best as you can possibly be with you within your own conscious evolution.

Yeah.

And every one of those levels has a healthy version and an unhealthy version.

With the integrated one,

That's the very top.

Yeah.

Is there,

Are there any downsides to that?

Are there?

Oh yeah.

With every level that you ascend to,

You solve the problem of the lower level,

But you create a brand new set of problems at the higher level.

So what's the problem with the integrated one,

If that's the final one?

It isn't the final one.

Oh,

It's not the final one.

No,

No.

There's at least two other levels above that that we've been able to at least notice in some beings.

And they will always unfold.

Consciousness is always evolving.

There's never going to be a final level.

And again,

None of these are better than any of them.

Right.

Yeah.

There's just different levels.

It's just at each level that goes higher,

There is a greater inclusiveness and a greater compassion.

So the simplest way of saying it is at the lowest level of consciousness,

You have fear and reactivity and chaos.

And that at the most leading edge of consciousness,

You have the greatest amount of compassion,

Embrace and love.

And so at each level of consciousness,

You have a greater capacity to hold perspective.

So what's the downfall of the integrative consciousness?

It's lonely.

It can come across as very self-inclusive.

It can come off as sort of haughty and righteous.

It can be a bit impatient.

And it breaks a lot of rules because it's focusing on competency.

It's focusing on flow.

It's focusing on best person to situation fit.

And it's able to say,

Yeah,

I see how you see that,

But you don't know what you don't see.

And so it can cause a lot of reactivity.

When you say it breaks a lot of rules,

What do you mean by that?

It's not interested.

That level of consciousness is no longer interested in your accolades,

Your titles,

Your initials,

Your seniority.

It's like,

Are you a good fit?

Are you competent?

Are you the best one?

Because this has got to happen.

I don't have time to play this.

It also has a certain level of impatience about it.

Tolerance seems to be a bit thin at that level because at that level,

The chaos is very apparent.

In the psychological speak,

This level is called chaotic.

It is a blend of the paradox of chaos and order.

And it's constantly wrestling with that ongoing paradox of chaos and order,

Chaos and order.

And so it's a very chaotic level of chaos and order.

And those people are brand new arriving at this consciousness.

So they are awakened,

But they are not yet embodied.

So you asked if there's levels beyond.

This level,

I would say,

Is integrally awakened,

But it is not integrally embodied.

The level beyond it would be embodied,

Which means you could walk that talk.

You could show up as that one and not just have the awakening and the awareness of it.

So there's a little bit of newbie itis to the people arriving at this,

Which is they get it all cognitively,

But their ability to live it hasn't quite developed yet.

They're a little wonky with it.

Remember we were teaching ballroom dance and somebody had just figured out the first couple of steps of cha-cha.

They thought they were hot and you're going,

Oh man,

You got a lot to learn.

They haven't really embodied it yet.

They're flailing their arms around and the timing is waff.

Right.

They got the feeling,

But it's not masterful.

Yeah.

And they're grinning like village idiots,

Man.

They're having a great old time.

They're having more fun with that cha-cha than anybody else.

But you look at them and go,

Okay,

It's an awesome start,

But there's a lot we got to cultivate.

You got to show up and have cha-cha in your body.

You got to live that rhythm as you.

You know that.

Yeah.

And with this whole,

I like how you distinguish between there's a level of awareness,

Which is where everything begins,

Right?

And then it kind of goes outward into the physical world.

And that's that level of mastery is really living it through your habits and actions.

And one thing that I've found myself in conversations about this too with my buddies is that it today we,

Especially with social media and you know,

You see these,

For example,

These inspirational videos and it's all about raising awareness.

But to me,

In some sense,

It's like a cheap high,

You know,

It's like these little four minute moments.

They're very well done videos.

You know,

It doesn't matter who made them,

But they're like,

There's some sort of story.

And then the lesson is very simple.

Like don't care what people think about you,

You know,

And it's a very well played story.

And you look at that video and like,

Oh my God,

You know,

You're right.

And it's all emotional.

You get a little high and then you're off back.

And we,

We prefer that because we can immediately access it through awareness.

We can get that little nugget,

A little burst,

But then we go back to Instagram scrolling or,

You know,

Complaining about,

Whatever our fries are cold or something like that,

You know?

So I don't know what it,

What is,

What is the key to,

You got that awareness.

That's.

.

.

I have the key.

I got it.

What's the,

What's the cheap.

.

.

I have the key.

You just won't like it.

What's the way to.

.

.

So I'll say something provocative and then I'll describe it.

Waking up is old news.

It's specifically about 2,

600 years old.

That's how old news waking up is.

Okay.

So I'm drawing an arbitrary line in the sand and saying,

Okay,

So what happened 2,

600 years ago?

Well,

The Buddha woke up.

Bud means awake.

Buddha is the one who awakened.

What did the Buddha awaken to?

His true nature,

Who he was and what he was.

And he found out that,

Okay,

What causes you to,

What causes you to stray from who you are and what you are.

Okay.

Desire.

Okay.

We have a being who woke up.

And back then that was probably one of the very,

Very first times where,

And it wasn't a the first time,

But it was one of the first times where somebody woke up and it began to catch fire.

That the evolutionary ripple of that particular awakening was very profound.

And we can mark that.

We can look on a calendar and mark that.

And that was important.

And then about 500 years later,

Another guy comes on the scene and he has another awakening experience,

Another unit of experience.

But this time it's not around the nature of who he is or what he is.

It's around compassion and love.

Okay.

And we mark that line in the sand and our entire calendar is based on this,

Right?

So we've got the awakening of Christ.

So we've got two very profound awakenings of mind and heart happening within about five,

600 years of one another.

Okay.

That's how old waking up is.

So what's changed?

Well,

The world has changed.

What am I saying?

The world has gone on to become more complex.

The world is more complex now than it was 2000 years ago.

We have more people.

We have more things to balance.

All those perspectives that I told you about have enrichened.

There's so much more going on.

So at that time awakening was enough.

What's happened since then?

Awakening is critical.

It is step one.

Developmentally since that time,

It's become important that you grow up,

You mature,

You begin to temper,

Fire,

Cask,

You know,

These awakenings.

Can you hold them stable?

Then that isn't enough either.

Now what's happening with this new wave of consciousness that's going to continue on from this moment for the next couple of hundred years is now showing up.

So waking up was enough at another epoch.

Then the time between that time and now has been about growing up,

Maturing,

Being able to harness and seize,

Maintain,

Sustain that awakening.

That's critical.

Now in our opinion,

What's happening is now we're being asked to embody it,

To show up,

To give the fruits of that awakening and that cultivation and give that from your deepest service.

Give that as your genius.

Give that as your brilliance.

So the difference would then be between growing up and showing up.

Growing up is really about trying to make it real for yourself,

Whereas showing up is,

Okay,

I've taken that growth that I've done and I'm serving.

I'm serving exactly.

I'm taking it to the next level.

I'm helping to expand the consciousness.

Yes,

And I would say if I may climb atop the shoulders of Gandhi and say,

Be the change was correct for the time.

Now it's going to be you must do the change without any kind of expectation of some sort of spiritual goody for doing it.

That it is because it is your calling,

Because it is your Dharma,

Because it is your mission to serve.

So I have a little sort of image in my mind and I'll go through it quickly,

Not to bore everybody,

But this is how I think about it.

If I'm playing in the mud,

I can suddenly discover,

Have an awakening.

Oh my God,

If I put this stuff in my hand,

I can turn it into a form.

I can make a little man with it.

I can make a little ball with it.

I can make a little bowl with this mud.

Isn't that fun?

It was this gooey stuff,

But I've molded it into an image that was in my head.

That's an awakening and that's brilliant.

Yeah.

You saw something that you didn't see before.

You've created something that wasn't there before.

And that's amazing.

But if I just let it go back into the mud,

It just becomes mud again.

But if I somehow by accident leave it sitting out,

I put it on the wall and the sun comes and it bakes it,

It'll harden it.

It'll stay in the form that I left it.

It'll be tempered.

It'll be great.

We temper steel.

We cask wine.

We fire pottery.

We mature cheese.

We love things that are put through a constraint.

We love things that are put through it.

As adults,

We love things that- Kept in some form or another.

Yeah.

As adults,

We really prize and value things that are aged,

That have been put through some sort of tempering process.

So if I leave it out,

The sun will bake that thing and it'll stay in that form.

And that's great too.

Okay.

So let's say it was a bowl.

Okay.

Now I've got a bowl.

Now it's hardened.

It stays in a bowl shape.

But if I just go home and give it to mom and say,

Mom,

I made you an ashtray.

Right?

And we all did this.

It goes on a shelf and it collects dust.

But if I take that bowl that I formed from my imagination,

From my deepest creative impulse,

I allow it to harden.

And then I put something in it and I serve you from it.

Now I'm putting it into action.

Yeah.

You put the action component to it.

I'm serving from it.

So for me,

That's how I exemplify and sort of imagine waking up,

Growing up and showing up in my mind.

Then to bring it all full circle,

We were.

.

.

Topic tonight was to talk about traumatic experiences.

We may have to clean up anywhere along that continuum.

So anywhere from waking up to growing up to showing up,

We may have to clean up.

I like that.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so that's how it all works for us.

That's our model.

That's the way we approach training.

That's the way we approach clients.

That's our viewpoint.

And we're having a lot of success with that.

And we're seeing rapid transformation.

And we've been lucky enough to be honored to help a lot of people.

It's really amazing what you guys do.

And I'm.

.

.

I love just how simple and how effective it is and how you bring it down and you make it relatable.

And it's like,

Wow,

You know,

Because a lot of the power in these situations.

.

.

And I use power in the word of like that they have power over us.

Is our own reflective mental thought about this happened and it's going to be hard to get over and God,

What a big deal it is.

And everybody else says it's such a big deal.

And you know,

You add so much weight to it,

You know,

But when you realize,

Like you said,

That we're very robust and that we can overcome so much more than we think we can.

I think that's very inspiring.

And that's what it's all about.

Yeah.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Well,

You want to share what.

.

.

You get some stuff coming up or going on.

Yeah.

So we do practitioner trainings ongoing and people can reach out to us at www.

Psylogia.

Org.

And there's some information on the website.

It's more of just an online business card,

But people can contact us through there.

And like I said,

We're taking applications for trainees,

People who want to be master coaches.

That's cool.

In this phenomenon and also people who are looking to heal themselves.

So we can help a person who's got struggles and setbacks with one-to-one coaching and we can also offer trainings in these protocols.

And we're not selling our system.

We want to empower others to be more effective at the craft that they've already taken on.

Giving some additional skills pretty much.

Yes,

Really fortifying their existing skill set.

And so that's how our trainings work.

People can find us there,

Send us any inquiries,

Any questions,

Anything like that.

We're happy to talk with people.

And so yeah.

Cool.

And we do work all over.

So we're international.

I do.

.

.

Gosh,

At this point I'm doing about 90% of my work over the telephone.

Wow,

That's incredible,

Man.

Yeah.

So pretty cool stuff.

Pretty cool stuff.

One more question for you.

What are you most grateful for today?

Today I'm most grateful for that which I did not plan on happening.

I am grateful for grace.

I'm grateful for the things that I did not plan on happening and that spontaneously happened anyway in spite of myself.

And that everyone around me was still served.

Even though we had hiccups and setbacks and annoyances,

We all got to where we were going.

And what needed to happen happened in spite of all my efforts to probably thwart that.

And I am deeply grateful that we still get there.

Wow.

That there's grace.

That's awesome,

Man.

Thank you so much,

Man.

This has been an amazing conversation as usual.

We always have awesome conversations.

We always have awesome conversations.

Totally awesome.

I love talking about this kind of stuff.

Good,

Good.

Next time I'll put you on the spot and we'll take you through a live demo of what we're talking about.

It's really piqued my interest for sure.

Yeah,

So we'll do that next time rather than just talk about it.

We'll actually take you through it.

If people listening want to go through it with you on that journey,

Then they'll get to go through it too.

Yeah,

Sweet.

Awesome,

Man.

Yeah.

All right.

Well,

Thank you so much,

Guys,

For listening to that interview with my awesome friend Wesley Fuqua.

He is the founder of the Sallogia Institute for the Development of Consciousness,

Purpose and Transformation over here in Arizona.

He's also served for 15 years as a psychological science faculty at Maricopa colleges in Arizona.

He's created a lot of coursework for the psychology of consciousness and mature ego development.

And recently he has put his efforts in educating and training therapists,

Counselors and coaches,

As well as leaders in the Sallogia method,

A rapid shift therapy,

As we kind of talked about in this interview,

Which is being positioned as one of the leading edge transformational psychological practices of the 21st century.

As you can see,

He's got massive,

Massive results in a very short amount of time with this powerful method.

So I highly encourage you know,

If any of this interview related to any part of your life,

Anybody in your life,

Anybody you know,

Share it with them,

Let them know,

You know,

This this kind of stuff,

I bring people on this show that are,

You know,

Obviously my people that I know,

Some people that I don't know,

But also that are really making an impact in the world.

That's what it's about.

It's about first,

Inspiring you,

Inspiring myself,

Spreading these inspirational stories and really cool things that maybe we didn't even know about.

But in second way,

It's also supporting these individuals who are up to great things,

Who are,

You know,

Trying to help people heal,

Help people recover,

Help people be empowered.

You know,

One of the things that I love about this podcast is that it's really about helping people be empowered.

You know,

One of the main topics and tenets of this podcast is to help you live a transformed life.

You know,

That's,

That's one of the big things.

And ultimately,

All these people that I bring in,

You know,

In the last couple months,

I've had,

You know,

People on healing,

You know,

Relationship abuse on the emotion code with my friend Lee,

We've talked about health and wellness,

We've talked about,

You know,

Trying to help you overcome the obstacles and barriers to your own success,

Your own happiness.

That's what it's all about.

You know,

We all have things that we carry with us,

You know,

Unfortunately,

It's just part of life,

Right?

But it's,

It's also a gift in disguise in the sense that,

You know,

Like we talked about in the interview,

Your wounds can be your greatest gifts,

If you really treat them that way,

And you use them as opportunities to grow.

And these kinds of trauma recovery situations,

These these modalities,

And,

And therapies can really go a long way,

Because they help you turn these,

These very negative experiences at first,

You know,

We suffer,

They're painful into opportunities and sources of creativity and inspiration,

You know,

Down the road,

And they help you flip the script,

So to speak,

Right.

So check them out,

You know,

Wesley is offering a free discovery session,

Usually there's a cost for that.

So if you mentioned this episode,

When you get in touch with them,

That's a free discovery session to basically,

You know,

Check out and see what what kind of stuff they have.

And then also,

The first responders,

If you're a first responder,

If you are in the military,

If you're a veteran,

If you any,

If you're suffering from any kind of post traumatic situation or still lingering effects of your your duty,

The cytology Institute is offering a complimentary trauma release session.

And just to remind you from the interview,

They've had amazing results in just one session.

So check it out.

You know,

That's a really,

Really cool thing that they're doing,

Especially for the first responders.

I absolutely love that.

So again,

Wesley,

You can reach them at www.

Silogia spelled p s y l o g i a.

Org.

Or you can call 602-284-9328.

My buddy Wesley,

Awesome guy,

Check him out.

And hope you have an awesome,

Awesome rest of your day.

Again,

If anything,

In this episode resonated with you,

Or people that you know,

Let them know spread the love.

You know,

It's not for me,

It's really for spreading these positive messages and sharing something that somebody wouldn't have found in their own way.

You know,

So you never know somebody like Wes that could make a difference in somebody in your life that maybe they would have never connected were it not for this episode.

So share the love.

I'll see you guys in the next episode.

Thank you so much and have a wonderful,

Wonderful day.

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