Lorne Brown:
By listening to the Conscious Fertility Podcast, you agree to not use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your own physician or healthcare provider for any medical issues that you may be having. This entire disclaimer also applies to any guest or contributors to the podcast. Welcome to Conscious Fertility, the show that listens to all of your fertility questions so that you can move from fear and suffering to peace of mind and joy. My name is Lorne Brown. I’m a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine and a clinical hypnotherapist. I’m on a mission to explore all the paths to peak fertility and joyful living. It’s time to learn how to be and receive so that you can create life on purpose.
I want to welcome Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein to the Conscious Fertility Podcast. Now he is a clinical psychologist and expert in the treatment of trauma, a certified Acomb mindfulness center, somatic psychotherapist, and a meditation teacher who’s been in private practice for over 40 years. There’s a lot that comes with experience of 40 years, is a lot. So grateful to have you on today. And he’s practiced meditation for over 56 years and he’s shared that that’s profoundly impact on every aspect of his work. And additionally, Dr. Rutstein is the creator, host, and lead teacher of Sounds True healing trauma program. And he’s devoted his professional life to helping people reduce their suffering and struggle while empowering them to calm their strengths, talents, and unique abilities to live a more fulfilling and rich life. Who wouldn’t want that? I want some of that. Welcome to the show. We’re glad to have you here.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Oh, I’m glad to be here for, thank you.

Lorne Brown:
We’ll start with just our audience. And our audience. A lot of them are trying to grow their family, but a lot of our listeners actually are not trying to grow their family. They’re just noticing that they’re struggling. They just can’t find that sense of ease, peace, and a lot of them are over 40, but not all. And they’ve realized that no matter what I get in the external world, whether it’s the relationship, the job, the money, their promotion, it’s temporary. And then they come back to this set point where they’re just not feeling great, which has motivated them to start doing inner work and to find out what else I can do. And this is why I want to have you on because I think you are one of those people that can tell us about that inner work. So I’m glad you’ve come on trauma. How do we describe trauma? How do we know we’re traumatized? And is it the event that is so important or is it more about how we perceive the event? I know that word is being used a lot today.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
That’s a great question. Back when I first started working, trauma was reserved for egregious incidents of horror violence, like witnessing someone being killed or being threatened to be killed yourself or abuse, torment, natural disasters. We’ve learned in the last 30 years that there can be a lot more low level type traumas, like a critical hospitalization, an automobile, the loss of a dear pet that these are stronger than losses. They really shock the nervous system. So I loved also how you differentiated in the question, is it about someone who’s experienced trauma or is it how they perceive it? And how someone perceives something is absolutely a part of whether it lands and resides in the system at some level as a kind of trauma. Now, there’s a caveat that comes with that. Children who are traumatized in family situations, abuse, violence, emotional abuse, neglect, will never, almost never consider that abuse, more trauma.
It’s just normal for them. But even so, even though their brain is labeling it as normal, it still is profoundly impacting their nervous system. And what we know now is that if you’ve had trauma, a significant level of trauma at some point in your life, it tends to stay in the nervous system until you do something about it. And what do I mean by that? Right. In more strong cases, people will have often flashbacks where they’ll have images or some awareness of what happened to them, or they’ll have body sensations, pain, other kinds of symptoms. They’ll feel ill, they’ll feel nauseous, they’ll feel a tightening around their neck, for example. So a lot of times, trauma lives in the body more than it does in our narrative, in our conscious way of telling the story of what happened. And people who know they’re traumatized are usually the people who are on the farther end of the spectrum because they see the widespread disruption in their life, either in relationships, trust, earning potential, their own ability to take care of themselves, to feel healthy, to feel entitled, to be happy.
But many of us who have had some traumatic events, maybe we didn’t call them traumatic, but they still may live in the nervous system in terms of how we try to manage our own internal emotional states. For example, a colleague of mine, Dr. Gabor Mate, has done a lot of research on addicts and has found that a majority of addicts report some level of history of trauma. And one of the ways that we view addiction now is in that lens that of course, not everybody who’s an addict has trauma, but for people who have trauma and are an addict, they’re really trying to manage their nervous system. They’re trying to manage feelings of overwhelm, despair, sadness, anger, terror. And so it gives a different focus and it helps you understand that this is really, especially for, I mean, I don’t think that an addiction is a moral failing for anyone, but in particular for trauma survivors, the longest lasting arm of trauma is the legacy of dysregulation.

Lorne Brown:
And I would love to talk about that and I want to recap some of the things you said or highlight that I find very interesting. So you said that the trauma lives in the nervous system until you’re ready to deal with it. How does somebody know? You used the word dysregulation, and that’s usually the word I use versus trauma In my practice, I often talk about how it’s a dysregulation or nervous system dysregulation. How would somebody know their nervous system is dysregulated because so many people have lived this way, this is what they would say is normal.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Exactly, exactly.

Lorne Brown:
So what does a regulated nervous system look like and what does a dysregulated nervous system look like so they can start to notice what’s going on in their body?

Jeffrey Rutstein:
So one of the first things that we think of when we think of a regulated nervous system is the capacity for flexibility to be able to move in and out of various states as needed. Flexibly like a little tutorial for our audience that we have these three areas we can source our nervous system energy from. We have the hyper arousal defensive states. This is sometimes called sympathetic arousal. People are familiar with the energy of this as fight or flight. We can also get a little bit into freeze at that area where we are then beginning to also become immobilized, but terrorized at the same time. Then we have the hypo activation, the very low energy defensive responses, and these are in the line of shutdown, collapse, disappear. And it ranges. Most of us would know that from peeling spacey or tired to unmotivated, don’t want to get out of bed, want to avoid responsibility or want to avoid having to do things. We just feel a need to pull back, withdraw, quiet down, turn off the world a little bit. That’s

Lorne Brown:
Interesting now, because that’s not as common that people hear both the fight or flight either fight or flight. I think a lot of people have heard that and the freeze, you just can’t move. But the shutdown is an interesting one, so thanks for sharing that because a lot of people I think are in shutdown but not aware then that’s in that hyper arousal state.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
That’s actually in the hypo hypo

Lorne Brown:
Shutdown would be hypo because you

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Exactly

Lorne Brown:
Right.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
So we have hyper up here, sympathetic fight or flight. We have hypo down to the lower end and that’s that collapse, withdraw, disappear. And in there we have anything from spaciness and tiredness to feeling blue, despair at further levels, numb, dissociated, and even further down, kind of like a feign death, which mammals can do. But humans also can do this in moments of great rate, danger, life, danger, they can almost go into a suspended kind of state. And then the third area we can source our nervous system energy from is what we call the window of tolerance or in polyvagal language, which is a theory about the nervous system. It’s called ventral vagal, which is this way of having access to humor, creativity, connection, balance, resilience. So you and I are probably most likely right now in that sweet spot in the window of tolerance, right This morning there was a traffic accident on my way to going and taking my wife to an appointment.
And so I was frustrated, a little overwhelmed by that, and I went up into sympathetic and I’m going to be late for the appointment and then late getting back, but then I moved out of it. So getting dysregulated is not the issue. We all get dysregulated all the time. It’s whether we get stuck and linger there. Now, as a kid I underwent trauma As a kid I was massively anxious and massively ashamed. So I had one foot in sympathetic fight or flight. I was fleeing all the time from everything. And when I wasn’t busy fleeing, I was feeling like I was a big piece of crap. And in childhood and my early adult life, I would just be in those places. I could alternate, but I didn’t really feel like I ever had any place in the middle where I could be present, connected, have a sense of humor, and actually have my awareness be more here than somewhere in the past or the future. Does that make sense?

Lorne Brown:
Yeah. And where is that when you’re in that ventral, is that the parasympathetic, when you’re feeling resource, when you’re feeling present, where does that come into play? You’re talking about nervous systems. You mentioned the sympathetic hyper and hypo and then

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Well actually it’s sympathetic, hyper, and then hypo energy in general. That’s called in the parasympathetic polyvagal theory states, we have two branches of the vagal vagus nerve. One of them is geared towards a very primitive kind of shutdown collapse. That’s a very defensive position. The other line of the vagus nerve is the ventral vagal nerve. The lower one is called the dorsal vagal, the back, the ventral is the front, and this branch of the vagus nerve helps us calm and be present, but also have access to other energy. Like if I’m in ventral and I get excited about something, I have a little bit of sympathetic going on there too, but it’s not knocking me out of regulation.

Lorne Brown:
It reminds me I got to share a story just because I help people connect it. And I don’t remember the episode, but Steven Porges has a great discussion on our podcast about the polyvagal theory where he goes into this as well. It’s a Bruce Springsteen story and I want you to kind of make sense of it because you’re kind of given me the science behind something he once shared. And the idea is that there’s between anxiety and excitement, they’re very similar. And he said that when he does a concert, if he doesn’t feel anxious is the word he used, then it’s not a good concert. He falls flat. And I was thinking from what you just shared, it wasn’t that he was in a negative anxious state, but he was in that state ventral, but he was able to access of that sympathetic to give him the energy to go out there and perform for three hours where somebody who’s anxious, where they’re not in that resource state, they’re just fully into hyper. They can’t focus, they can’t do anything. There’s just way too much energy. Am I understanding that correctly, how you described

Jeffrey Rutstein:
It? That’s a great understanding, right.

Lorne Brown:
Springsteen was in the sweet spot,

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Right? Springsteen was a neurologist. He understands these things. There’s a phrase called the optimal level of anxiety or arousal, and that means that to do successfully on a fairly intensive task, we need to have enough energy that enough of that anxious energy for perseverance, for pushing ourselves through. So a little bit of anxiety can make us sharper and mid to a lot of anxiety can actually make it harder for us to do what we need to do because we’ll be more and more hijacked by the anxiety, meaning we get taken over by it. There’s not much of us left in our boots standing.

Lorne Brown:
So balance is key. In Chinese medicine, trained in the yin yang theory, yang is very out there, yin is quiet. And if you’re more extreme either way it’s not healthy. But if you have a bit of balance going in and out, it’s very healthy.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Exactly.

Lorne Brown:
In our society, I mean first of all, it seems like when you’re describing some of the dysregulation, it sounds like we’re having a collective trauma in our world. It seems like people are either shut down or very, because I want to bring it into some of the physical, the health people experience. When you have a chronic dysregulated nervous system, how does this show up physically with, because I think of psycho immunology, so we’ve got our immune system, nervous system, but can you talk a little bit about that and maybe we’ll even tie that into oral health and even reproductive health?

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Sure. So one thing I’ll say right off the bat is we also know from studies that a dysregulated nervous system is associated with or leads to a dysregulated immune system. So the more that one is in a extreme activation or extreme deactivation in their nervous system, there will be similarly an inefficiency in the immune system. So that’s why med students during final exams often get sick, go to the infirmary. We have studies that show this because as pressure rises, immune system drop and people are then more able to have opportunistic bugs take root in them.

Lorne Brown:
I’ll just add then for our reproductive patients, for those that are trying to grow their families, not every reproductive patient for those trying to grow your family immune system is very important to have a healthy regulated immune system to allow for implantation. So that’s one. What else does dysregulate system?

Jeffrey Rutstein:
So again, it depends on where someone hangs out. Some people bounce back and forth from sympathetic to that dorsal kind of shutdown collapse, but some people have a favorite place, they spend more time up here. So irritability is a sign of being dysregulated, rumination, unable to stop thinking, obsessing about something, finding that once you get angry, it’s really, really hard to get angry, to be able to free your, you keep ruminating about it, thinking about it, talking to people about it, you keep it alive. Or the same thing with fear. If you’re afraid of something, you’re just focusing on the fear. You’re not really focusing on how your meal tastes or this conversation with this friend, you’re a little bit too consumed with this bad thing that you anticipate happening. And if someone is dysregulated and spending a lot of time in that low energy, dorsal, vagal state collapse and shut down, they’re going to find they can’t get stuff done.
They don’t finish tasks, they get overwhelmed so easily and they need to withdraw. They can’t be with people very much. They feel like they’re not living up to their potential or people who have chronic shame stories or narratives going on. That’s also a symptom of being dysregulated in that vein. And we can have people, of course, who bounce from high energy to very low energy to high energy and feel literally I’ll have people come in and go, I feel crazy because I’m up and down so much. And it’s really helpful for some to understand you’re not crazy, you’re not broken. It’s your nervous system. It’s your nervous system doing what it’s supposed to do, trying to keep you safe, and it bounces right now for you. And people can learn how to regulate, but first people need to understand what needs regulation. A lot of people don’t even pay attention to their nervousness. I’m just anxious. That’s just me, right? I’m just a tired guy. That’s just me. I wanted

Lorne Brown:
To go back to some of your background and just approach because I am realizing you’re a psychologist and I think of that as talk therapy, kind of a top down approach. And you’re trained in omi, which I think is more of a bottom up a somatic type approach. There’s the yin yang. I think that’s great because it’s balanced. What’s the difference, or I’ll put it this way, is often people come in and they’re doing talk therapy, but the way the therapy they’re doing, they’re constantly reliving the story. And so it sounds like they’re them themselves. I’m kind of subscribed to the idea I’d like both approaches the talk, but with the somatics approach, you’re trained in bro in both. So I’m just curious, what’s your thoughts on that of retelling the story versus as clinical hypnotherapist we’re kind of the bottom up where we’re working more on the somatic, the visceral all the time from my style anyhow. But I’d love to hear a little bit more about your hami or your somatic approach. I think it’s becoming more popular where people are doing this type of work. Traditionally it’s been mostly talk therapy. So I thought we could introduce our audience into why, if at all you think the somatic has some benefit and why they may want explore that as well.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
So I was trained originally as a psychoanalyst back in the day 45 years ago. And so that was as talk therapy as you could get someone in your office anywhere from once a week to four or five times a week, sometimes on the couch facing away from you, free associated, and that had some benefit. People could really get to understand a lot of what was going on, but it was totally insufficient for trauma survivors. It was too unstructured, it was too disconnected with just leave them floating in their dysregulation because traditional talk therapy doesn’t really look at dysregulation. It looks at dynamics or belief patterns or thought patterns, which help. But it’s really helpful to understand that all of this is being driven by the nervous system and by nervous system habits of attempting to keep you safe. So I trained in ha, I think 2006, 2007, and what I found immediately is that when I engaged in that work, it got to places with the patient that I could almost never get with talk therapy, both the depth but also the way that people were able to relate to it differently in their body versus if it’s just talk therapy, you’re going to have a better story, but that won’t help you and you just regulate it.
You don’t know where the story is in that moment. You’re out of your mind. You’re kind of flailing about in a state. But if you begin to track and work with the body when it’s in a state, it becomes more familiar for you. And then you also can begin both to notice where you are in terms of arousal state, but also that opens up then the opportunity to intervene. And so I work with also teaching a lot of very specific techniques for lowering arousal or raising energy. If someone is really hijacked by that shutdown and collapsed state and they’re not getting out of the house, they’re not getting out of bed, they’re not applying for a job, they just can’t start anything, then we actually need to work instead of it calming down on helping the system feel safe, having more energy in it again and again, it depends on the household. Like you were saying, it can be fighting. It doesn’t have to be trauma. It can be something that’s perceived as scary or threatening. That’s enough to set the nervous system off. Doesn’t actually have to be a five star trauma with a capital T. It can be something that is unnerving threatening, frightening of a sufficient intensity or in some families in a sufficient regularity that it tends to make the nervous system less stable.

Lorne Brown:
On that note as well, do you think that it can be carried forward? So generational trauma, does it get kind of tagged on our DNA?

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Yes. And you made a statement before about some people are born sensitive, which is true. Some people are just born with a sensitive nervous system. But we also know that our DNA carries trauma of previous generations. They did this famous study years ago with lab mice, I

Lorne Brown:
Don’t know if you’re familiar with this one, cherry blossom or orange blossom.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Yes. Love that. Exactly right. So put these mice on shock tables or grids and would shock them and would pair it with a cherry blossom soak scent soaked in a cotton ball. Then they eventually withdrew. The shock table just presented the cherry blossom to them and they would start to spasm and convulse like they were having a shock. Then that experiment was completed. They didn’t do anything else. They let that family of mice, generational mice go five generations out without any more training, nothing else. Five generations, great, great, great grandkids come up. They put ’em in one of these experimental areas, they expose them to a cotton ball soaked and cherry blossom, and they start to spasm and convulse the DNA learning of the traumatic learning with shock, pairing it with that scent of cherry blossom. And you have the physical reaction as if they’re getting shocked that was totally passed down.
Five generations without one word, they don’t speak and without any more training. So some people are born sensitive because their lineage has had trauma because some people in their grandparents’ lives or their parents’ life went through very significant traumatic experiences. And we know that that changes the epigenetic expression of genes, which can therefore express how the body works, how the nervous system is regulated or dysregulated. So when I meet a kid that’s anxious, I really then start wondering, okay, is it just that this is kid’s constitution or is it that this child is also carrying forth and is a sensitive child, but they’re carrying forth some of the legacy of abuse and trauma that has haunted previous

Lorne Brown:
Generations and there’s no place to put blame on anybody. You just show up and do your work to heal.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Right? And sometimes you do your work for you because it’s your stuff and sometimes you do your work because it’s also something you’re carrying because everyone in your lineage has been carrying

Lorne Brown:
Just the synchronicity. So this morning when I woke up, my colleague sent me an email and I haven’t had a chance to look at the study, but I pulled up the title. So related to what we just said, it was in the Journal of Nature, I think molecular psychiatry, January, 2025, exposure to Childhood’s. Maltreatment. So trauma stress is associated with specific epigenetic patterns in sperm. So the study talks about how the stress that the father goes gets impacted onto the sperm and gets passed on to the next generation.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Fascinating. If you do me a favor and send that to me maybe later, I’d love

Lorne Brown:
That. Send that to you for sure.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
That sounds great.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah. And so finally something in medicine where the man has some responsibility, it seems like always the women are carrying the responsibility, they’re always going from a fertility perspective, how they’re the ones doing all the clinical work. So just for us guys, we got to show up and do our work as well.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Sure, sure. Absolutely. And answering your other question, I do think that if we also work with our nervous system with an eye on if there’s been a family history of trauma, a legacy of trauma, that in some ways then we are clearing the field for future generations. We’re taking care of our work on ourselves and we’re taking care of the unfinished work of our ancestors so that we don’t have to burden this again with our kids. Our kids might get some of the DNA still passed through the trauma, but they will also get with it a more resilient nervous system if parents have been working on theirs.

Lorne Brown:
When I got into conscious work on a serious level back around, started playing with it in 20 10, 20 11, but 2014 made it like my mission to heal. What really resonated with me was the teacher of consciousness said that when you do this work and you heal, it heals your family constellation, your ancestors will benefit and your children will benefit, and I have children. So I got into it because the debilitating anxiety came up and it didn’t make sense to me. My life on the outside was pretty damn good and still is, but I was having, where is this coming from? Which made me think of generational drama.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Exactly.

Lorne Brown:
I just decided I’m going to work it. And then I didn’t want my children to carry that, even though I was doing well. So many people, once they’re doing well, stopped doing the work basically as she would say, and then your eagle will crawl back up your ass is what she said, you’ll be back. So she encouraged you not to stop the work. When I got to this place of feeling regulated, I continued because I could see some of my behaviors in my children who were not brought up in that same environment, but yet they’re still exhibiting it, and it really resonated with me and thinking, oh, I still have work to do because I can see it in my children. Even when they were young. Exactly. I kept doing the work.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
That’s love for your kids.

Lorne Brown:
Yeah, love for your kids, absolutely. What are some of the I’m a fan when I work with people, I always like simple. I usually use a phrase from when I was trained in psych K. We say we set the intention that this work would be simple, powerful, effective, and playful. The simple part, I like simple. I don’t like to do complicated. I know there’s a risk of simple because people often can dismiss it. As easy as I often use the breath, breath as a tool because it’s so simple to do a nervous system hack. I’m curious if you can share simple tools or techniques that you have found to benefit a lot of the people that you get to see including yourself.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Sure. So again, we use different techniques depending upon what the person is struggling with. So for downregulating, the nervous system for when you’re in fight or flight, then what’s helpful to the nervous system is to do relaxing, soothing, calming practices that help lower you towards that sweet spot window of tolerance, that area of regulation. One of the first ones we teach is the long out breath, which is breathing in through your nose maybe for count of two or three, and then exhaling for twice as long through your mouth as if you are exhaling through a thin narrow straw. So it’s like 1, 2, 3, and then exhale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Inhale, 1, 2, 3 through the nose, exhale through the mouth, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Again, inhale through the nose, 1, 2, 3, exhale through the mouth. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Some people find it’s a little, feels a little weird at first because they’re not used to sustaining their breath.
But again, if you concentrate on just letting a little bit out instead of having to take in 11 gallons of air so you can breathe out for forever, you just need a short breath and then you’re sustaining it and it’s the elongated or lengthening of the outbreath that directly down relic regulates the nervous system slows down, respiration slows down, heart rate slows down and lowers blood pressure a little bit. Interesting. Inhalations craze the body. So one of the things that we’ll teach for people who are chronically low arousal there in that collapse space, we’ll teach ’em like the breath of fire, which is inhaling very long and exhaling briefly and doing that again and again and again, faster and faster. But the inhalation is longer, the exhale is short. It really helps stimulate energy in the body can make people a little bit more accessing of movement.
One of the things that disappears is when we’re in that dorsal collapse, we don’t feel like we can do anything or want to do anything. So it needs to be easy and simple like you said, for people to do. Now with trauma survivors, sometimes breath work can be tricky, especially if part of their trauma involved having their breath restraint. And so because of that then we can do other things. So another downregulating practice is the containment hug, which again, some people love this, some people have a funny feeling about it. That’s as simple as taking your left fingers, excuse me, your right fingers from your right hand, putting it under your left armpit, taking your left hand and grasping either your bicep or your shoulder, whichever feels most comfortable. And then pulling in, pulling your frost arms in towards your sternum, which presses a nerve plexus on the sternum, which also helps lower arousal.
But if you can feel as you’re holding yourself like this because the body can’t distinguish if it’s being touched by a loving other or by you. The same impact on the nervous system occurs when we have touch self-generated or other generated as long as it feels safe. And that’s that the nervous system tends to almost give a sigh and settle a little bit. If someone is low energy and again they don’t have uticaria, have a reaction, skin reaction to temperature changes, hot or cold, I wouldn’t recommend someone who has that issue do this. But you can place very cold water or ice on your neck, back of your neck on the insides of your wrists and sometimes in the right above where the collarbone are, but putting ice to these areas is a little shocking and it’s energizing and it can help sort of wake you up. So these are some handy things we offer. There’s tons other, but those are a few that people can experiment with or working with their feelings of dysregulation.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you for that. I was smiling during their breath. My listeners will know that that’s one of the things I really like to use as one of my tools of breath and I do in for four, hold for four out for eight, but it’s always on the exhale and just want to unpack. People often like to know the Y as you shared and blowing through the straw. The exhale is what kind engages the parasympathetic, then it lowers that heart rate, and so that’s why we want to focus on the exhale for that. The other one, the quick breathing, is that kind of similar to the Wim Hof breath work then to energize because it’s similar, there’s some similar to energize the body. Yes.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
I haven’t used any of his techniques with my clients. A few of my clients have done that because I had more of a background in yoga and I know more of the science beyond the breath techniques. That’s why I favored breath of fire. But I think that whims exercises are similar

Lorne Brown:
And that hug, I love that I’ve often with emotional freedom technique, we do the butterfly tapping
On the collarbone, but I love this. I often think when I think of the subconscious and clinical hypnosis work, the autonomic nervous system, to me that’s the subconscious. It lives in every cell and I often share that the subconscious can’t tell the difference between an inner and outer experience for imagination reality. So I’m going to use this where you do that hug because I like the words that really connected with me. A, I love the science when you say presses on some of the nerves that kind of engage that parasympathetic, but you can’t tell whether it’s from you’re hugging yourself or outside. And so again, that simple mind hack to just get that hug in there that I think can go a long way. Thanks for sharing that. I love simple tools like this.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
I’ll give you one more if that’s okay

Lorne Brown:
Please.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
And this is one we do for both regulation and for also cultivating a sense of compassion, which by the way, we don’t access compassion when we’re in fight or flight or shutdown. We only can access it when we’re regulated and we do something called the face heart connection. I don’t know whether Steve Porges talked about this, but Deb Dana has talked about this too. And that’s one hand on a cheek and one hand on your chest. You can use whichever hand where it depends on what feels most comfortable in your body. But then with all of these, what’s important is actually to take a few moments to linger in this position and to feel it with your awareness to sort of put your awareness in, for example, into the chest and feel how the hand is contacting the chest and feel how the chest is receiving the hand and see and feel how the cheek is receiving the hand and how the hand is perceiving and connecting with what’s it feeling as it makes a contact with the cheek. And you may notice, Lorne, that as you stay here for a moment, there is a little bit of settling. It’s like a little bit of gently, and this is especially helpful if someone is struggling with shame, self-judgment, self-criticism, being really harsh and unforgiving with themselves that this posture, this hand position, this face heart connection is both grounding and helps us more tangibly connect with a sense of kindness, sense of tenderness, sense of gentleness. What do you notice?

Lorne Brown:
Just sense of relief, a little bit of peace.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Right? Right. The body knows right away when something’s right.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you for that.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Sure.

Lorne Brown:
The question that I wanted to ask though is more going from a spiritual perspective and it’s a curiosity question I have. There is the materialistic view and quantum view. That’s what I’m going to give it. So when we do this work, we can measure and see things happening. The heart rate changes, blood flow changes. You talked about how when it’s dysregulated we can see it in the immune system. Many have talked as I’ve seen as if you’ve talked, not today, but you talk about how it can create systemic chronic inflammation, which isn’t great for the body. When we get into this more parasympathetic, we’re highly aroused. I use the word, we become resourced and the body can thrive when we do this awareness. So that notice part, becoming aware, what state am I in? The wondering I have is, or my thought process is I think when we get quiet and we take time to go inside and like you’re saying, feel your body parts, you start to become aware of just physical senses, start to feel the emotions and rather than putting resistance, rather than trying not to feel these feelings, you actually start to allow those feelings to come up and you are observing them.
You’re noticing that’s the key. You’re observing and noticing them. I think we’re tuning into what many call witness consciousness or consciousness or your higher self, and I think that’s what’s doing the metabolism of these uncomfortable emotions. I don’t think it’s Lorne Brown, and my metaphor I use for this as ego Lorne is when I bite an apple, I Lorne choose to bite the apple and chew, but Lorne ego does not say, now release enzymes from my mouth. Lorne doesn’t say now acid from the stomach. I’m like, okay Jeffrey, we can’t talk right now. I’m absorbing my minerals from my apple. I need to focus. I’m doing whatever I need to do. There’s something other than me, my autonomic nervous system, which is part of the subconscious. It does the metabolism, digestion of that apple. I think when people work with you and myself and we facilitate and they’re able to become that observer with compassion, with curiosity and start to just notice it and you could be using EFT or other techniques and you start to notice your physical science without trying to change them, just allow them to be there and observe. I think somehow that tunes us into our higher self consciousness, our witness consciousness, and it’s doing all this wonderful stuff in the background. So that’s my spiritual trying to understand why I see why can somebody come in just hyper, hyper and then have this incredible sense of relief. Now their experience, their story that still exists, but now they have a massive shift in how they’re experiencing in the present moment.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Right. That’s interesting. I think I have a very similar but slightly different view. I don’t go to positing, its awareness that’s doing this or its higher consciousness or witnessing self. It’s when we are able to truly be aware of what’s arising as it’s arising to be caring and compassionate like you said, and to be curious about it, we open up this kind of receptivity that it has a chance to flow through us because most of the time when we get an unpleasant or painful experience, we clamp down, we contract and we really work it pushing that away. I don’t want to be angry, I don’t want this pain in my knee. I don’t want this headache. And so we usually have an adversarial relationship to any kind of experience we don’t want, especially emotional or physical pain. And you’ve heard that phrase, I’m sure what you resist persists.
There’s a shift that happens when people go from resisting and fighting something to being able to be a compassionate witness. That just allows then what’s ever there to move. Not that the person is moving, right? If I sort of am able to compassionately witness my shame, my shame can unspool itself. I don’t have to say, okay, shame, go away now or reduce yourself, or I’m in this nice space, so get out of here. It’s more like there’s no resistance. Whatever was there is there, but it morphs, it moves. It doesn’t take on a solid reinforced life of its own.

Lorne Brown:
Well, I’m aligned with that and I often, and that’s part of my understanding, episode one we had with a good friend, colleague, Randy Lewis about reproductive health. It’s all about flow and receptivity. And so when you are fighting with reality, think of loving what is by Barr and Katie, right? When you’re fighting with what is you suffer, there’s resistance. We call that in Chinese medicine. Cheese stagnation. Right? Right, exactly. Resistance. Right. And then when you are not fighting with reality, it doesn’t mean you’re resigned to it. It doesn’t mean you like it, you’re just not resisting it. Then flow and receptivity comes through you and that’s chief flow and that creates creativity, health and healing and better reproduction. Absolutely. And I heard you say this brilliantly and so I’ll paraphrase it, life will happen and I may feel shame and the shame goes through me and I would consider the healthy nervous system is I feel it for a minute or two minutes and then I’m back to my resting peace state. When we’re dysregulated, it’s chronic. So I’m in shame for hours and days and months. And the Chinese medicine said this as well, emotions are a human experience. There’s nothing wrong with being angry, being shame, being sad, but if you get cut off in traffic today and two days later you’re still upset about being cut off in traffic, that is an imbalance.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Yes, exactly right. And that’s where on a really practical level, I’m no longer present. I can’t be in this conversation because I’m still wanting to yell at that person who cut me off or scream at that person that did this. I’m still holding that. I’m not fully engaged. If I’m not fully engaged, I’m missing my life. The biggest cost of dysregulation besides the health costs, the inflammation, the sleep interferences, is that it absolutely impairs our ability to thrive. And it absolutely impairs our ability to sort of offer our gifts because when we are chronically dysregulated, when we’re chronically struggling, we’re trying to tame the weather all the time, so to speak, the inner weather. We’re not in a place where we can go about offering our strengths, offering our gifts, being able to participate in the world in a way that feels both empowering to us and of service and kindness to

Lorne Brown:
Others. And there’s an approach to regulate your nervous system. You brought up your colleague, Gabor Mate. His office was just a few doors down streets from mine, and we did a talk in the early two thousands when he was promoting his book When the Body says No, and his talk was all about what stress does to the body. And so after he was done, everybody was pretty depressed. He realized how bad stress was and then I came in and shared, but wait, we wouldn’t tell you how bad stress is if we didn’t have a way to shift it. So this is where you come in. I want to let people know about your website and the trauma program. I think the trauma healing program that you’re offering through Sounds true. That’s still happening now, right?

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Yes. We just began this year’s cohort happens once

Lorne Brown:
A year. Perfect. Your website is Dr. Jeffrey, dr dr jeffrey rothRutstein.com. We’ll put that in the show notes. And you have a healing program, a trauma healing program through Sounds True. We’ll put that link there, and I love that you made it. I think it’s about nine months.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Yes.

Lorne Brown:
Because my teacher once said that this is a paradigm shift that you’re doing. You’re not fixing this in a weekend, right?

Jeffrey Rutstein:
That’s the words we use. Oh, really? This is a paradigm shift. We’re actually getting people to look through the lens of their moment to moment experience and to understand it with a map of the nervous system so you can understand where you are. It goes back to what you were referring to before. Those four questions, which is they’re called our four guiding questions. Deb, Dana had developed these, and the four are, number one, what state am I in? Number two, what do I need to move a bit more towards ventral?

Lorne Brown:
Ventral is that resource state.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Exactly that. More calm, more present, more connected. I’m not overwhelmed. I can feel my body. I can feel and think at the same time, and I actually can pay attention to what you’re saying instead of racing ahead to what I need to say next or what I have to do about this conversation. Then the second two questions. The third question is what state are they in? Then being the person you’re going to interact with, your boss, a subordinate child, family member, friend, and what do they need and what do they need to feel a little more safe or a little bit more regulated? We’re not trying to make someone like say, I’m coming into the room and I want to have a conversation with you. If I’m coming in and I’m not aware that I’m in a little bit of fight, that fight energy is going to come out of my mouth and go, Lorne, it’s about time.
We have this talk. And that’s going to send your nervous system back. You’re just going to feel like a little attack, a little defensive. If I’m aware of that, I put myself in some ventral before that. It means that I’m going to have the best chance of connecting with you successfully. Hey Lorne, I’d really like to talk about this. Is this a good time? And if I then check out you maybe even before I say this, well, Lorne seems like he’s regulated. I’ll ask, oh, Lorne seems like he’s really dysregulated. He’s really struggling with something he’s pissed off about from this morning. I don’t think I want to ask him about the talk, what I need right now. What does he need? What does he need to be a little bit more ventral, maybe some space or maybe just a comment from me, looks like you had a really difficult morning. Do you want to talk about it? In other words, it helps inform me how to dance with you in a way that we have a higher likelihood of being successful in connecting and in having some kind of true exchange versus us just ricocheting off of each other’s activation.

Lorne Brown:
And if I’m in ventral resource, then I often think of myself. We’re all like wifi, so can I help impact your nervous system by staying calm? And what do they need? I’ll share again with my listeners. Your process reminds me a bit of how I share how to have a conscious relationship, a conversation, and the term is called by Byron Katie has written several books. She’s a teacher of conscience to our listeners, but my teacher of consciousness called it the Byron Katie sandwich. And she said, every conversation it goes with what do they need or where are they in? She always said first, make sure they feel heard. That’s the first bread. Then speak your truth. Your truth is your truth. It’s not speaking your mind. Let me tell you. It’s what you need, what you want. No defending, no, but no, and then bridge, because some people don’t like a no.
So there could be, you can bridge it. You can soften it. When you say, what do they need? I will share my go-to always, and I learned this through our local attachment psychologist, Gordon Neufeld, who wrote a book with your friend Gabor. He’s been on our podcast as well. I heard him say, every human being needs the same thing or wants the same thing to be seen and to be heard. When you feel seen and heard, you feel loved. So if somebody comes in and you’re able to hear them, doesn’t mean you agree with them. That often will help bring them into what you are calling ventral because they’re feeling heard, which gives them that sense of safety.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Exactly. And that also speaks to two points that we also teach, which is there’s self-regulation, us engaging in practices that help us regulate. And then there’s co-regulation and co-regulation can occur between say, me and you, two humans, two mammals. It concur between a human and a mammal or a reptile like a pet. It can occur between us and our sense of God or the universe, and it can also occur between us and nature. So there’s different types of co-regulation that also we may need to take advantage of. When I’m really dysregulated, it’s harder sometimes for me to reregulate, I can, but it takes work. But my partner, my wife is a wonderful co-regulation and so I can just speak to her about what’s going on. And we’ve been through this enough. She hasn’t tried to fix it. She hasn’t tried to tell me what to do. She just gives me space to find my own way with it. And she’s kind and loving and supportive, just honoring what she’s hearing, whether she agrees with it or not, like what you were saying before. And that alone often is all that my nervous system needs to come back into regulation to come back into connection with her and connection with me.

Lorne Brown:
I love it. Alright, everybody, Dr. Jeffrey Rutstein. That’s his website. And then Sounds True on the Healing Trauma Program. If you’re looking to regulate that nervous system, whether it’s just because you want to experience peace, enjoying your life, or you’re looking to improve your health, because we’ve learned that through a dysregulated nervous system, we can get systemic inflammation, which is a cause of so many diseases. It impacts our digestive system. It can impact our cardiovascular system. I heard you say sleep our immune system, it pretty much can impact every aspect of our physical health. So if you could put that in a pill, a wouldn’t you be a billionaire If you could put that in a pill. And guess what? You guys are the pill. So you have the ability to learn these techniques and tools so you can self-regulate, which is what I think this is all about. So Jeffrey, I want to thank you very much for making the time today to join me on the Conscious Fertility Podcast.

Jeffrey Rutstein:
Lorne, it was a pleasure. I had a good time.

Speaker 3:
If you’re looking for support to grow your family contact ACU Balance Wellness Center at ACU Balance, they help you reach your peak fertility potential through their integrative approach using low level laser therapy, fertility, acupuncture, and naturopathic. Download the ACU Balance Fertility Diet and Dr. Brown’s video for mastering manifestation and clearing subconscious blocks. Go to accu balance.ca. That’s a c balance ca.

Lorne Brown:
Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Conscious Fertility, the show that helps you receive life on purpose. Please take a moment to subscribe to the show and join the community of women and men on their path to peak fertility and choosing to live consciously on purpose. I would love to continue this conversation with you, so please direct message me on Instagram at Lorne Brown official. That’s Instagram, Lorne Brown official, or you can visit my websites Lorne brown.com and ACU balance.ca. Until the next episode, stay curious and for a few moments, bring your awareness to your heart center and breathe.