Engineer Your Body To Improve Your Mind - Aaron Alexander

Aaron Alexander is a manual therapist and movement coach, founder of the Align Method and an author. Health & fitness has been broken down into a very compartmentalised, reductionist view. Muscles are trained in isolation, mindfulness practise doesn't occur in the gym, physicality isn't thought of when you sit down at your desk. I wanted to speak to Aaron to explain how we can take a global, aligned, macro-view of our body's wellness to impact more than just how we look but how we feel, think, sit, sleep, have sex and everything else... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Check out Aaron's website - https://www.alignpodcast.com/ Watch Aaron's Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/alignpodcast Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #fitness #health #mindset - 00:00 Intro 01:21 Aaron’s Approach to Fitness 07:17 Common Problems in Training Plans 11:17 Physical Practices for Daily Life 20:21 Choosing the Right Workout 29:14 Building a Holistic Training Culture 35:50 The Role of Shame in Sex & Relationships 42:47 Aaron’s Plans for a Successful 2022 54:18 The Power of Movement for Wellbeing 1:11:00 Where to Find Alex - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A hundred percent of the time you were under a state of construction and all your body knows is environmental stimuli. So you have this amazing opportunity to, through exposure therapy, you can start to make yourself be stronger or weaker. So if you don't expose your body to enough exposure in the form of heat, in the form of cold, in the form of some type of hermetic stressor, then the body will start to atrophy because it's inherently incredibly lazy.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  There won't be a single shot where I can put my hand in all of these, will there?

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Not really.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Oh, do you need to see it? I thought it was just an audio thing.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, no, because what you're trying to do is you're syncing, you're syncing the audio with the video. Can watch it.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Oh, I thought it was just an audio blip, but yeah, you're right. God dang it.

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  What can I say, man?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  I'm not a videographer.

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  No, no, but that's.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  I just like clapping.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  Just here to clap.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Maybe we both clap. Boom, all angles.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  Podcast time.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  We're in.

• 1:01Chris Williamson?

  Podcast time.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're locked in.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  Aaron Alexander, welcome to the show.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Christopher, thank you for making this happen. It's been a god dang pleasure getting to know you over the last few weeks.

• 1:10Chris Williamson?

  So good, man.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the bromances happened quickly.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Bromance is real.

• 1:15Chris Williamson?

  It's got serious.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:16Chris Williamson?

  Very fast.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Yep, we're moving quick.

• 1:18Chris Williamson?

  How would you describe your approach to fitness? I've been very interested since I've been out here. We've trained a fair bit. We've done some sessions barefooted in on it, doing sprint training and contralateral movements and all manner of different things that as someone that's spent a lot of time training, I've seen online, but I've not really been exposed to very much. And I'm quite interested to work out how you arrive at whatever view of health and fitness it is that you have.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So my first thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. My background.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Mostly was in manual therapy, like my main field of specialty is working with people from hands-on bodywork. And before that, it was, it was training. But my main interest really has been helping people come into alignment with their bodies, so that we can get them to a point that when they move through their lives, as they are breathing, as they're just living their lives, they can be almost self-organizing into a greater place of alignment, of balance, of homeostasis, just through their existence. And that sounds a little

• 2:35Speaker 00

  bit maybe like meta and out there. So specifically, what that means is looking at what are the the variables, the environmental conditions that are forming the body to fit into the positions that might create discomfort or disease. And so my approach to fitness isn't so much about what we're doing in a gym, it's more what we're doing for all the times that we're not in the gym. And I consider the gym to be, for me, the gym's like, my buddy Kelly Start, who he did the the foreword for my, my book coming up, he calls it like classical ballet. And so when you're in the gym, you're working on these

• 3:16Speaker 00

  classical forms to bring your body into balance enough that you can go out and do modern dance. You know, modern dance is the rest of your life. And so what I'm really interested with with fitness predominantly is, how do you start to integrate the concepts that you'd learn in a gym, in a yoga studio, in a martial arts studio, into the way that you show up in business, and when you're out on a date with somebody, when you're at your house watching Netflix, all of that is fitness. And your body doesn't know the difference between I'm in a yoga studio, or I'm just, you know, at my, my house in my underpants.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  What would you say to someone that says, Fitness and my training in the gym has nothing to do with how I show up in business. Fitness is for fitness and movement is for movement. Why does it matter about how I train in the gym relates to how I show up for a date?

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's like the idea of being, taking 20 years to be an overnight success. You know, we're cultivating, we're grooving paths, you know, neuro neurological paths, muscular paths, neuromuscular paths every day throughout every moment. And so your body doesn't know an off and on. Right now, as we're sitting in this position, you are generating electrical stimuli in around your hips and any place that your body's coming in contact with the, with the chair. So the term for that is mechanotransduction. You're squishing cells, you might be shearing cells, you might be twisting cells.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  And then there's going to be a chemical response, a chemical translation to that. And within that, that pushing that's happening against your hips, there's electrical charge around that space, it's called piezoelectricity. That's going to be sending a signal to the cells that would be building connective tissue or bone tissue or muscle tissue or fascia. And what you're sending within these signals, you're, you're like the engineer of your body. You're saying, okay, we need to beef up in this space around maybe, you know, maybe you have bunions in your feet, so you actually can see like a callousing of specific tissue. That's just wear and tear in that specific range of motion. So you're sending that electricity based off of the way that you live your daily life.

• 5:31Speaker 00

  And then, you know, the fibro blasts and the fibro class, these little cells that either add tissue or take tissue away, they respond accordingly. And you are structuring yourself just by sitting in a chair. And so when you take that mindset of like, Holy crap, like right now, I'm literally under a state of construction. When you get up off of this chair, you're tuned up to perform in the shape that you've been practicing most. You know, so a thing that you might have heard is practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. So throughout the day, you're continually practicing how to engage or inhabit your physical body.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  And then when it does come time to show up in a meaningful way, you gotta pick up a heavy trailer, you know, or something. You know, you gotta suddenly sprint across a parking lot or whatever it may be. Your body is tuned up and queued up to be able to perform because you spent the last day, week, month, year in more of like a, kind of like a ready position. And then you can be too ready, you know, where you're too queued up. You're in like sympathetic overdrive and that's gonna be too much. If you're adding too much stiffness into the system, then the system can't rest and digest and heal and repair. You know, so this isn't, what I'm saying doesn't mean that you always have to have like a stick up your ass

• 6:57Speaker 00

  and have like axial extension, like your spine's back. You know, you look perfectly enlightened and samadhi and spiritual and strong and stable. It's being able to relax, but being able to relax into functionality. The way that we can relax into functionality, you know, there's specific things that we can talk about.

• 7:14Chris Williamson?

  What would you say, looking at the current trends in fitness and training, what would you say are the main areas that people are missing out on? Or what are the main problems that you're seeing with most people's training programs?

• 7:28Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, there's a lot of things. It depends, it really depends on what gym you're in. You know, so if you go to a most traditional, like a 24 hour fitness type space, there's a lot of disintegration or myopic focus on specific muscles without much awareness to integrating the whole, putting the whole body together to work as one, one integrated body. So when you're excessively focused on myopically breaking down individual, like a muscle by muscle approach, you just can't do it. Like you can't organize 640 odd muscles, depends on the specific individual, you know, 360 joints. It's just, it's too much chaos.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  And so for you to be able to Go in and really think like, you know, joint by joint, muscle by muscle, I'm going to be engaging these and then I'm going to, it's just going to magically all come together. That can be confusing for the body, you know, so.

• 8:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by confusing?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  It can be confusing for the body in the sense that if you don't train athleticism, you won't just self-organize and be athletic.

• 8:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so breaking the component parts of musculature apart.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:45Chris Williamson?

  And training biceps and triceps and overhead extensions and chest press.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:49Chris Williamson?

  Blah, blah.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if you're excessively aesthetically focused, it's completely fine. There's no moralistic judgment. Juji Mufu is a good example of this, where he has done a pretty good job of integrating athleticism and calisthenics and gymnastics and powerlifting and bodybuilding, you know, so he's a bit of an oddity in his ability to juggle a lot of variables and it's really beautiful.

• 9:18Chris Williamson?

  He calls himself a hybrid athlete, right?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  He is.

• 9:21Chris Williamson?

  That's what he refers to.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what he is.

• 9:23Chris Williamson?

  A polyathlete, I can't remember.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, and then within, within that, I would say, you know, athletics goes beyond just, you know, musculoskeletal integration, but also, you know, how's your response to cold temperatures? How's your response to heat?

• 9:42Chris Williamson?

  Why is that part of fitness? Why would someone who says, I do fitness, I've got a fitness plan. Do you do hot and cold exposure? No, I don't. Okay. Why, what would you say to someone who's?

• 9:51Speaker 00

  The same way that your body has a physiological adaptation, you know, a hermetic stress, we were talking on my podcast before this, we're talking about hermetic stressors in our lives, the same way that you'd have that to develop muscle cells to be able to be stronger in a specific position as a product of going through, you know, a bicep curl or deadlift or whatever you're doing, your body has a similar physiologic response to being exposed to cold temperatures, has a similar physiological response to being exposed to heat, has a similar physiological response to being exposed to altitude, you know, and so your body is continually changing. And this is the thing that we, that we started off with, a hundred percent of the time you were under a state of construction and all your body knows is environmental stimuli.

• 10:38Speaker 00

  So you have this amazing opportunity to, through exposure therapy, it just, you can start to make yourself be stronger or weaker. You know, so if you don't expose your body to enough exposure in the form of heat, in the form of cold, in the form of heat, in the form of some type of hermetic stressor, then the body will start to atrophy because it's inherently incredibly lazy. And that laziness, it's, it's, it's like one of the key features in our capacities to survive.

• 11:09Chris Williamson?

  What would you say? Let's talk about some physical practices for a bit. What are some of the physical practices that you think? I know that you're big into groundedness and getting hips below knees. That's one of them.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the thing.

• 11:22Chris Williamson?

  What about that and some of the other physical practices that you think people should just play around with? A little bit more when they're in the gym. The sense of play itself is also another part of what I've noticed in the sessions I've done with you. Is, is a rarity. So let's talk about that.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we, all human beings are riding on millennia of spending time with our hips below our knees. Spending time moving along, you know, not necessarily like crawling along the ground. Oh, that's a part of your, your developmental patterns and depending upon your belief system, evolution, that was probably a thing as well. And you're probably swinging through trees. If you believe in evolution as well, you're an arboreal creature.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  You know, and then that transition to being a bipedal mammal cruising along the land. You know, but that's, a lot of that's kind of, it could change depending upon, you know, what, what you think. So it's, it's all hypothetical, like where exactly where we came from. But getting down on the ground, if you just look at like present day thoughts and evolution aside, look at any child, the way that a child navigates their own physiology and their own construction of themselves is they will squat, they will sit, you know, in like, kind of like a cross legged position, maybe a straddle position. Maybe at some point they'll start to kneel. And so they're spending a lot of time in that low position.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  And that's what you see as well, looking at hunter gatherer tribe. Specifically, the the Hata people in Northern Tanzania is where there's been research about this. From University of Southern California, specifically is where this came out of. Researchers went out there and measured the amount of time that Hata people were spending in resting positions. Because the big idea is like, you know, we're like this culture of sedentarism, it's killing us, it's causing all of our issues and metabolic disease and depression. But if you look at hunter gatherer tribes, Hata specifically. What you'll see is they spend about 9.82 hours was the averages that they gathered in resting positions. So, right now, we're in a resting position.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  The difference is we're up on chairs, you know, so we're forming our body into a certain way in this position. Hunter gatherer tribes, Hata specifically, would be in kneeling positions for a good chunk of the day. They'll be in squatting positions for a good chunk of the day. They'll be in, you know, essentially all the same positions you see your your child in. And when you're in those positions, one, it's just, it's helpful with circulating blood, circulating lymph. You know, like cankles are unattractive, but they're also incredibly unhealthy. It's an indication it's like, oh, we're in trouble. You know, and so what that does outside of just being, you know, making you feel energetically lighter, you know, and and more attractive. Because you don't have like big thick ankles.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  You're setting yourself up to stay athletic all the way through your life. And so when you start to limit range of motion, the ankles, limit range of motion in the hips. That affects your gait pattern, the way that you walk, the way that you move throughout the world. Also, elderly needing assisted living. The number one leading reason for that is they've, you know, they fall and they can't get up. Yeah. So fall risk is this massive thing that's completely specific to westernized culture abandoning the ground.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  It's like unbelievable when you think about it, like if you really give that a moment of the amount of sovereignty that's been lost and the amount of, you know, time and money and energy and worry. And it's like, all of that is wrapped in, is wrapped up in us literally making an unconscious

• 15:10Speaker 00

  move away from where we came from, which is just naturally resting in those positions throughout the day.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  So what would be the prescription? Let's say that someone listens and they go, okay, yeah, that, that sounds good. I want to, I want to get rid of my ankles. I don't want to be falling in, falling and hurting myself when I'm 70 years old. What's a good way that someone can integrate these practices into their day?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  So just changing your environment, you know? So have you done one with Bruce Lipton?

• 15:36Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Okay. I think we've talked about him. I did a podcast with Bruce Lipton a year and a half ago or so. He's, you know, big, has been massive in championing the concept of, of epigenetics, you know, and how our environment changes our genetic outcome. And one of the things that he mentioned to me was, you know, when he was studying cells in, in Petri dishes, if he wanted to change something about the cell, he wouldn't do anything specifically to the cell itself. It would be changing the culture that the cell exists in. You know, so within your own body, if you're just focusing intrinsically and what's happening inside the body itself, that's a great start. It might get you somewhere, but until you actually change the environment that's forming

• 16:21Speaker 00

  the body and, and the mind and, you know, your, your perception of self and all that to, to fit that mold, you're just going to keep falling back into the same position. You know, so you can do all the, the calf raises or all the, you know, the couch stretches or all the different kind of therapeutic rehab, prehab exercises you want. But what got you into that position in the first place? You know, and so the first place that I would start is saying like, okay, like just create a space in your home. It could be in front of the couch, you know, get yourself like a comfortable rug. So it's inviting to get down. To you could put like self care tools in your house, have like a foam roller lying around or get one of those like percussor guns or, you know, a softball to kind of do some

• 17:05Speaker 00

  my fashion release stuff on, get some Moroccan poofs, you know, or like floor cushions. So suddenly the culture that your cell is inhabiting itself within is shifted to invite the cell to create change in itself, just with these like really basic visual cues. You see, you walk into a space with a, a pull up bar hanging through some doorway. Just naturally, innately, you will have the urge to your arms like suddenly levitate over your head. You're like, I'm, I'm on the bar. Like, it's like, it's magic. The bar is there, hands on the bar. I didn't have to give you any reps or sets or tell you

• 17:50Speaker 00

  got, and that's the element of, of, of play. You know, so if we can start to make the, the movement landscape, you know, the, the environment that we inhabit ourselves in, suddenly it's like we become moved by the environment. Right? So when you walk outside, if it's kind of cold, and you say, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a little, little cold thermogenesis here. I'm not going to put like all of the layers on, you know, you go out there and you get moved by the cold. Suddenly, you know, you have this heribulation and your hair kind of sticks up and your body activates its own insulation system by causing your hair to raise up. It's like a, it's like a, it's like a down sleeping bag on top of your body. Like,

• 18:35Speaker 00

  whoa, it's pretty cool that we have that capacity. We just need to place ourselves into the environmental conditions in order for our body to show up. But inherently, your body wants to show up. It's just, we have done such a tremendous job at outsourcing our body's necessity to show up to, you know, to machine or to Amazon. Nothing wrong with that. It's actually brilliant. It's like, it's freaking amazing that, that the human mind has been able to outsource almost everything, to the point that you can lay on a couch, press buttons on your

• 19:09Chris Williamson?

  And not die.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  And have food delivered to your face, have sex delivered to your face. Like, it's pretty freaking impressive. Like, I'm not mad at it. I'm really just like, in awe, like, whoa. Starting from like, whacking rocks together to create fire.

• 19:26Chris Williamson?

  To sex in the face.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  To sex in the face off of your blue lit screen, like.

• 19:31Chris Williamson?

  Good effort.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Good effort. And those parts that we've outsourced, not only is it work, but, but work is therapeutic. You know, and so we can experience that or, or witness that in the physical body and your biology. But you can also experience that just in your day to day life. And in my podcast before this, we were talking about purpose, you know, and like the, the pressure to have purpose, you know, and when a person feels like they are living a, an hour on purpose, or a day on purpose, or a life on purpose, it's gratifying. You know, and usually what that is, it's like, you did work.

• 20:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  You know, you, you were here and you moved yourself to there. You're like, ah, I feel better.

• 20:18Chris Williamson?

  I did a thing.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  I did a thing.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I am, this is something increasingly that I've realized is an important, an important consideration when doing any sort of practice, and especially since we've been out here. Me and you have spent a lot of time at Kuya, which is a hot and cold exposure place next door, but even training as well, that if you do a training session or any sort of physical practice, the best judge of whether or not it was right for you is whether you feel good afterward or not.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:46Chris Williamson?

  Do I feel good?

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 20:48Chris Williamson?

  After I've completed this?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 20:50Chris Williamson?

  Because if I don't, then what, why, why am I doing it? We go out of next door, having done three rounds of what, 20 minutes hot, three minutes cold-ish, something like that on average.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:01Chris Williamson?

  And I feel on top of the world. Like, I feel phenomenal. Like, the, the best post-sex glow without having to find someone else to do it with.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Isn't that great?

• 21:10Chris Williamson?

  Outstanding. Like, and that's just that you haven't, you haven't put anything in your body, haven't taken anything. This is completely internally generated.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:19Chris Williamson?

  From doing that. And then the same with some of the sessions of training, you know, I came up with this thing called the Mano Paws, right? Which was the, toward the end of their twenties, I saw a lot of guys, myself included, having trained doing,

• 21:36Chris Williamson?

  like bro split lifting for a decade, maybe because we wanted to get big and be attractive to girls or whatever. And then you realize, oh, I get out of breath going a per set of stairs and I can't touch my toes anymore. And I'm pretty sure that my body is meant to do more than just bicep curls. And you start to revert back to other modes of training. So maybe you do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, or Thai boxing, or yoga, or CrossFit, or functional fitness, or fucking running, or athletics, whatever, right? And I found that my satisfaction after doing those sorts of sessions was so much higher, so much higher after doing that kind of a workout. And I,

• 22:19Chris Williamson?

  it just made me think how many people are doing a training modality that they really genuinely don't enjoy, and that the body is telling them that they don't enjoy, but that they just stick at it because, and this is probably correct, that something is better than nothing. But that if the end goal of your fitness is to make you be like a happier, healthier, stronger human being, then you can just use, how do I feel post-workout? As a pretty good judge of whether or not my training modality at the moment is working.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, it's like we were talking about before as well. It's like you don't know what you don't know. You know, so if you are, have been, you know, whatever workout, dogma or regimen you've subscribed to over the years, you kind of have, you're just like getting work in, just like getting it done.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  That's great. I'd rather someone have, oh, thanks, you turned my gain up.

• 23:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  I was noticing it was a little low.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  You're a little bit quiet. It's fine.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Damn, I was noticing that the whole time.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so some work is better than no work.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  But you can paint yourself into a corner with your work that eventually you might have to reverse engineer to get yourself out of that corner.

• 23:29Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean?

• 23:30Speaker 00

  So, so say Ronnie Coleman would be a great example of this. You know, have you, have you watched any Ronnie Coleman stuff?

• 23:36Chris Williamson?

  Kind of sad to see him now, yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Super sweet guy, like really like beautiful heart. I don't know him personally, but you know, I, I, I spend, I've spent enough hours watching like,

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I'm like, he's like a sweetie, you know, but he would be a great example, you know, of he's, he's, he did it, you know, he'd like, like goal arrived at, you know, smashed, smashed the goal.

• 24:01Chris Williamson?

  The, the only thing that he ever regretted in his entire bodybuilding career was not doing eight hundred for five.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 24:07Chris Williamson?

  He did it for two and he was adamant that he could have backscored eight hundred for five instead. Like I knew I had another three in me.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Ronnie, you're, you're, you're bed bound with 75 steel screws in your spine and you live on the highest dose of painkillers that is legally allowed. And your one regret is that you didn't do eight hundred for five instead of eight hundred to two.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yep. So for him, he won, like ultimately it's all perception and filters and you know, how we, it's like, what are your goals? So I think the first thing for someone is to, to have a definitive goal of what it is that you, where do you want to arrive? And I, I think it would, it would behoove people to draw beyond just where do I want to arrive aesthetically, but also coming from a place of, of feel, you know? So how do you want to feel in one week, one year, you know, 30 years? You know, what, what are, what are the, the values that are actually in fact, the most important for you? You know, and I think if people are, a lot of people are honest or really feel into that question, you probably want to, you know, be, feel, you don't want to feel a bunch of pain.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  You know, you want to feel light in your body, you want to feel flexible in your body, you want to be able to be adaptable, you want to feel strong, you want to feel confident, you want to be able to play with your kids or your grandkids or be able to get down and pick up a dog. Uh, like those things matter, you know, so I would, I would think about how do we start to reverse engineer a program to make sure that we have some of those staples ingrained into the system. And what that's going to look like is you're probably gonna be walking, you're probably maybe gonna be like lunging, you know, keeping that some that spaciousness open and around the ankles and around the hips, keeping flexibility and adaptability throughout the spine. You know, when the spine is, is impinged, or impinge is a fine word

• 25:54Speaker 00

  for it, or off neutral be another way of saying it feels unstable, it feels unsafe, it doesn't trust you to be strong. And so if you're moving through the world and say, like, you know, like a forward head posture type position, or your shoulders are collapsed forward, or you have excessive extension in the lower back and the lumbar spine,

• 26:20Speaker 00

  that's sending the signal to your central nervous system that it's not safe to go, you know, deliver power through this system.

• 26:29Chris Williamson?

  Yep, just switches it off.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  It just switches it off. Super amazing. Like, you're like, thank you. Because I'd much rather you have some type of parent figure for my, the, the function of my nervous system.

• 26:44Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  Because I'm not responsible enough for that. It's the same, it's the same thing with breathing, it's same thing with, you know, cardiac function, the same thing with lymphatic function. You're not responsible enough to govern all of these systems.

• 26:57Chris Williamson?

  So you have to have the quality control manager that oversees it all.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. So if you're wondering why maybe you feel stiff chronically, or maybe you feel like, man, I've like reached this plateau and I just can't go beyond it, there could be a conversation around joint balance or centration, centration just being a 50 cent word for, for balance, really, you know, having maximum range, having joints oriented so that I have match, maximum capacity to move in all directions. That's athleticism, that's adaptability. If my joints are pinned up to, you know, the edge, they're on like the precipice of disaster. If I go any further in this one direction, but then I have excessive mobility in the other direction, then inevitably your body, because it loves you, it's going to put you into bracing and tension.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Now, all of a sudden, an analogy for that would be like, it's like you left your house with the, with the lights on.

• 27:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  So now throughout the day, your lights are just, you got the air conditioner running, you got the lights on, vacuum cleaner, just, just vacuuming nothing. Because your body's like, you're like, it's holding that, it's, it's holding itself together. Because ultimately, it's, it's received the message that if it lets go, that would be unsafe.

• 28:14Chris Williamson?

  There's a good story that Stu McGill uses about one of the world's strongest man events from a few years ago. And I want to say it was, it was either a, they were back squatting a car, or they were overhead pressing, like axle pressing a car. And he said, if you watch the event, you can see the rep before the guy is about to fail. It must have been, it was back squatting. You can see the rep before he fails. Every single person, and this is true, you can go back and check it. Every single person, when they reset from the penultimate set, penultimate rep before they fail, all of them take a big breath in and just shift their hips a tiny little bit.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:56Chris Williamson?

  He's like, that is the spine saying, buddy, you've got nothing left in the tank.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  We're done.

• 29:01Chris Williamson?

  Yep. So I'm gonna kill the power.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  And then when they go to power out of the bottom, maybe their legs have got something in it. But the spine's decided to pull the, the kill cord.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:12Chris Williamson?

  And there's just nothing left. So let's say, let's say that somebody that's listening does a lot of training and they think, right, okay, this sounds, and this sounds great. Like I, I need to be functional. I should move in a more holistic manner. I like the idea of creating an environment in my house that kind of engenders a parasympathetic, very calm, self-love, self-work kind of environment. What else can I do? Like, give me some practices, give me some takeaways.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 29:40Chris Williamson?

  That I can do to encourage a more holistic, aligned body protocol.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, so two of the things we mentioned is just making, orienting your space so that you just get your damn hips below the height of your, your knees every now and again. Like just get yourself. Down there.

• 30:00Chris Williamson?

  So that's in that sort of upright squatting position.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure, or anything.

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  You do that sometimes leaning up against a wall. So someone could just get down off the couch and then just lean up against the couch with in that bottom of the squat position.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just be and then so a part of that as well as is per mentioned before, like engendering a bit more of this this nature of play into your life, you know, inviting that into even inviting that into conversations and not being so damn stuffy and serious. You know, the way that we communicate to each other, if you look at, and this is going out of like, well, this is kind of kind of practices that are in the book, or at least conversations or philosophies of the book. You know, different cultures gesticulate, they use their hand gestures or facial expressions more or less than others. You know, so you go to Italy, suddenly it's like you're out here and here and here, you

• 30:53Speaker 00

  know, somebody grabs you by the shirt, like pulls you in. You know, it's like, that's just how we communicate. Like, that's just expressing, you know? And you maybe go someplace else, maybe like, I don't know, you know, someplace in the United States, or maybe like a Muslim culture be different, like a like a Buddhist culture is going to be different than a, you know, each place has their movement signature. And there is, there are, there are implications and repercussions of of each of these, you know, and it's like the, what do they, what do they call it? The French paradox? It's like, how are these damn French people eating all these baguettes? And they're still like pretty darn healthy.

• 31:32Chris Williamson?

  How is it? How is it that they managed to eat all these baguettes and they're healthy?

• 31:34Speaker 00

  I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of elements in that. I think community is the main one. I think people run on community. We run on purpose, we run on community, we run on the sensation that I've got your back, you've got my back. You know, and I think that when that when we have that sensation of of safety, again, safety, central nervous system, neutral spine, right? When we come into that place of feeling safe with my community, it allows me at a neuro muscular cellular, like all the way down into ourselves level, to be able to relax, to be able to breathe, to be able to, you know, have that.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  And so I think the French paradox has a lot to do with people just getting out and eating together and drinking together and smoking cigarettes and whatever brings people together. Like I would take a smoker, ideally like some organic cigarettes that are just mostly exclusively tobacco and not a bunch of chemicals that gets them to go outside and take a walk and connect and like, you know, have a shoulder to lean on and get some natural sunlight exposure to their eyeballs and maybe get a little cold thermogenesis or maybe a little heat. And, you know, they have their vice quotations. I would take that person over the orthorexic person.

• 32:57Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Orthorexic person that's like, has an unhealthy obsession with health.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  I'd take that person any day for, to be on my kickball team, to be on my, you know, my, my, my, my business.

• 33:10Chris Williamson?

  The person who's obsessed with health but spends all of their time on their own, staring at the screen and never getting the hips below their knees and doesn't have a culture and doesn't have a community and doesn't have support structure.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So again, I'm not advising that people take up tobacco. But if you look at that tobacco, what is it? The tobacco, in the last conversation, we were talking about dogs. You're moved by your dog. Dog comes into the room, you don't just sit there aimlessly, you know, kind of like monk like staring forward, you react and engage with the dog. So suddenly your facial patterns change and suddenly your voice tonality might change. You know, there's a Steven, Steven Porges, he's a guy that, that came up with the concept of polyvagal theory, calls it that your voice prosity. And so when we're communicating, we're literally tuning each other's nervous systems based off of the tone of our voices.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  You know, so there's a professor from, a professor of psychology in the sixties called Albert Morabian, I know I'm jumping around a little bit, but it's gonna maybe wind back to something. Came up with a thing called the 55 38 7 principle. And what that suggests is 55% of our communication comes from body language and then 38 is coming from the tone of our voice. And then there's the, the last little 7% is like the actual words that we're conveying. So if there's incongruence between what the body is saying. And the words with at least, I mean, I think it's, I mean, unless you're a complete dummy, I think it's higher than 93%, but you're going to trust the body 93% of the time.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  You know, so the cigarette, not condoning cigarettes, you know, but it, it, it moves the person. Say, I got a cigarette. Okay. We can't smoke inside. I'm walking outside. Ah, dog comes into the room. You know, if you're like a, a, you know, a large, you know, an overweight person that's stuck in your house staring at TV all day long, stressing out about the computer. One of the healthiest things you could probably do for yourself is just start by getting a dog.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  Buy a fucking dog, man.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Get a dog. You're doing all this stuff, you know, you're getting your protein shakes and you got your creatine, you got your glutamine, you know, you got the trainer that you go see three times a week and, you know, none of them are going to create the difference that would manifest in your life by having that, just having that accountability in that relationship with that dog. And that's, you know, not even, it's excluding all of like the, the immune benefits of a dog bringing, we were talking about this as well, bringing nature into the house.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  What about, a little bit of a pivot, what about sex and what about relationships? With the work that you've done, have you seen a, what dysfunctions do you see with regards to people and their relationship to sex and to their own body and to the way that they judge other people's bodies as well?

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Well, definitely not my field of depth, but I think it's very, an interesting conversation that is a physical conversation around that. Not that sex isn't physical, but more like anatomical would be the way that shame manifests in the body. You know, so growing up in a culture that doesn't have maybe full ease around sex, you know, or menstruation, or having a penis, or having an anus, or all of these things, like, oh, like, everyone gets a little uncomfortable if you say anus. It's like, whoa, pull it back. It was like, yeah, you got one, I got

• 36:51Speaker 00

  one. Like, I took a shit four hours ago, you know, but it's like to, to, to talk about that or to think about that. It's like, oh my God. It's like, what if I didn't take a shit today? It would be dramatically, what if I didn't take a shit for a week? It would be like, my whole life would be in shambles.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  You know, and so I think sex is one of those things. It's like our nether regions. You know, that part of our body, it's, it's, we're not really inculcated, for the most part, at least I wasn't, into a culture that has a lot of acceptance of those spaces. You know, in the way that shame manifests in the body, just look at it physically. If you're ashamed, if you're embarrassed, you know, without getting metaphysical, you know, saying like, oh, shame. There's deep tension in the perineum and the cells and the root chakra, or any kind of, just kind of random, random bits. Feel in your body, what does shame feel like? You know, like for, for you, if you suddenly felt-

• 37:54Chris Williamson?

  Tightness. It's like a sort of stiffness and a tightness in the, in the stomach, in the head.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, or maybe a collapse could be a flavor of it.

• 38:02Chris Williamson?

  Folding forwards.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, right? You know, what does pride, what does strength feel like? What does sadness feel like? You know, the whole gamut of emotions. And that's, that's Sir William James, who's, he's like widely known as the, the father of modern psychology. He was one of the, the preeminent leaders in the conversation of not just a top-down physiology, being like the mind affects the body, you know, so we see a bear, I'm scared, I run, you know, and I respond. We could just as easily flip that around and go bottom up and say, I see a bear.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  I have a physiological response. It moves my body into this state that we deem to be fear. And that perpetuates the feeling and the emotion. And then that winds back and it's this ping pong, boom, boom, feedback system, back and forth, mind, body, mind, body, mind, body. It doesn't matter where it starts or where it ends, like the chicken or the egg question. It's like both, whatever, like it doesn't matter. They're inextricably tied.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  So if we grow up in a culture that inherently there's a, maybe it's not overt shame, but maybe just like shadow, you know, or blank spots, like there's some pages in our physiology, in our anatomy that aren't as well filled out.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  You know, so there's a term, you ever heard the term homunculus?

• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Homunculus, it means little man. And essentially it's like, well, just flip my, my toothpick here. Homunculus means little man. It's, it's essentially like the, the way that it's like the neurological real estate that our body has to sensation or of how different appendages experience sensation. The amount of real estate that's offered to that sensory reception and there's various different parts in the body, you know? And so your fingers will have in this little man image, it's like literally a, you could, we could, you could look it up. It's a really interesting thing to see. They've got like really big lips, you know, and they've got like really big hands and, you know, pretty reasonably sized genitals, actually.

• 40:17Chris Williamson?

  He's got a piece.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  He's got a piece on him.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  You know, so that distribution of sensory awareness can change depending upon a person's life experience. And so there's some places in the body that for some people, it might literally be like a shadow place, like you could numb that space out. You know, some people don't have a lot of sensation in certain parts of their body, like maybe like their back. You know, you could rub a, you know, a paper clip or a feather or something in certain parts of the body. It's like, no, I've literally shut that part down. And then it becomes this whole process of re-engaging and reintegrating that, that aspect of yourself.

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  And you think symbolically that can happen with regards to shame around sex and our bodies, not just in terms of how we perceive them physiologically, if we can touch them and if we can get feedback, but how we see them symbolically in our minds?

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I think so. What do you think?

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, certainly, man. I mean, the. Definitely since being out here in Austin, fuck, like, people here have got a very, some people here have got a very liberal, very open relationship to sex and sexual practices and talking about sex, far more, I don't know whether it's a British thing, maybe it is a little bit, but far more than I've been used to in the UK. And I'd say I'm, you know, relatively open about being happy to talk about things that have gone well or badly, or that I'd like or don't like during sex. But fuck, out here is another level. I don't know whether that's.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  And just because you talk about a thing a lot, doesn't mean that you have a healthy relationship with it.

• 41:54Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. But I mean, this not being able to talk about it at all probably isn't a sign of a good relationship with it.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Also not.

• 42:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So it's been, it's been interesting being out here.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  It's the flexibility. Again, it comes back to adaptability and flexibility. If you're, if something makes you uncomfortable, if I say a word, you know, any of the words I said previously, and you go, whoa, a little bit, just a little bit, you're like, ah, cool. That's a place that there is, if you choose to take it on an opportunity, probably for you to uncover some, you know, internal impingement. You don't need to address it, but it's, it's there. If someone pisses you off, you know, or if someone makes you feel away, it's probably some reflection back into some insecurity within yourself, or else there wouldn't be a charge around it.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  What are you working on at the moment, personally? Like, what, what's the next 2022? If you were to look back at the end of 2022 and consider it a success, what would have been a, a development that you would have gone through?

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, something that we've talked about previously is I have a bit of a tendency of, and I don't know if I enjoy it, but I have a proclivity towards chasing, you know, and that was kind of something that we've been talking about in relation to like, to female relationships and something that I'm observing in myself, you know, when something is unavailable, it becomes highly prized. And when the availability begins there, sometimes I, not sometimes, I can completely notice.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  The opportunity to work with that for me is is resistance around that or a disinterest kind of like a like an avoidant type pattern. You know, and so for me, it's like, aha, okay, well, there's, there's the work. You know, so now it's, it's my, the onus is on, on me alone to engage with it. Or to go to the next and re-perpetuate patterns. And so that for me, it's like looking in and really being honest with what that is.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it is?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Likely my story for that, which I think that's another thing to be cautious of is being too attached to our stories.

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, over rationalizing or over narratizing, whatever it is that you're supposed to do.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  And that's when things, things that kind of trump our stories, like maybe some type of, you know, breathwork ceremony thing or some life event that was.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  Drags you outside of the narrative that you've tried to wrap around and rationalize a story with. Yeah, that's an interesting way.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Whatever it may be, suddenly you're like, oh, okay, story out, you know, story on the side.

• 44:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Now here's like God.

• 44:49Chris Williamson?

  Reality.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's like, this is like the higher purview comes in, it's like, okay, we don't need words right now, little Aaron. This is, we're just on truth. You know, and I think that those moments happen when they happen. But for me, the narrative that I have that I think probably has some level of sense to it is I think that my mother was who I did, I've done actually a full, like, like 90 minute podcast with her. And I was like, I think it's a, I know it was the only podcast that I've ever like really properly broke down, wept in a couple of times.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  And she had a background of some level of abuse. I'm not sure if I shared in the podcast or not, so I don't know if it's appropriate to share, but she learned that it's not appropriate to not be okay. You know, so kind of like good vibes only type thing, which is incredibly dangerous because then you lack decompression. You know, so suddenly you pin it up, you know, any of those sensations that would be deemed unfavorable. It's just like, okay, those don't go out, they go in and now they just sit and fester and kind of ferment. And so getting the signal that everything needs to be okay, everything needs to like be alrighty. I think

• 46:17Speaker 00

  that there was a certain level of, she was very caring, very sweet, you know, always made me sandwiches and always like had my back. But I think there was a certain emotional vulnerability that was challenging for her to access. And I think I subconsciously picked that up. And so when there is emotional vulnerability, specifically with a female, it's scary to me, you know, and so I'm like, oh, this is like a lot, you know, and so within that, I think I've adapted and a lot of people have done this, you know, I've adapted to be able to create rapport with quickness, you know, so what I've, because of a general

• 46:59Speaker 00

  avoidance of depth, I've reintroduced that bandwidth into like superficial. And so I think you have have this as well, probably for different reasons, but an ability to connect with new people and find common ground pretty quick.

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

  And yours, you think is maybe part of a defense mechanism?

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure.

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 47:24Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, that's interesting.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  And then when it goes to a certain level, I'm like, okay.

• 47:28Chris Williamson?

  Too far, too far.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Too far.

• 47:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  But we're like, you know, like fast bros or fast, you know,

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  bro and sister, like real fast. And then there's a certain level because that that part's so well developed. There's a certain level that it's kind of like, okay.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  And as soon as you're outside of that safety. Position. Yeah, I am.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Hopefully that wasn't too much information about my.

• 47:50Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all. I think it's fucking interesting, man. Like, it's really interesting to think that you could compensate for a fear of depth or a hesitation around depth by

• 48:03Chris Williamson?

  overselling on rapport or overselling on immediate connection. And that makes a lot of sense. It doesn't resonate with me personally, but I can absolutely see how it would happen.

• 48:17Chris Williamson?

  So getting through that, trying to get yourself past the slightly more, I guess, juvenile areas of, of the avoidant attachment side. I mean, I have a ton of friends and I think that this is, I'd be very interested to find out how this relates to people that are, whatever, high agency or high achieving guys. A lot of my buddies that are high achievers also have that attachment style. Which is funny because

• 48:47Chris Williamson?

  people are prepared to push their limits in so many places, you know, if we needed to do a 24 hour workout or a, you know, an unbelievable sauna and cold session or whatever, like pick, pick whatever challenge it is that you want to do. And yet there are these sort of deep, dark holes that sometimes don't get uncovered quite so easily. Maybe they're a little bit more difficult to see what's going on. Maybe they're just an area of the territory that we can't get rid of as simply. But it is strange that.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  There's nothing to get rid of.

• 49:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, to deal with.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  I know that you heard yourself probably as you're saying that.

• 49:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  To, to, to come into healthier relationship with.

• 49:34Chris Williamson?

  To face on.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  And healthy just means whole. That's like the original meaning of health.

• 49:38Chris Williamson?

  Does it?

• 49:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So whole, coming back to the body, integrated. So if I disconnect the parts, you know, I got my bicep brachialis and I got my triceps and I got the, you know, the, the multiple heads of the quads and I got, you know, really specifically breaking down those individual points, um, that can potentially lead to a, a, a disintegration of the, the whole body working together. And then that creates, you know, cacophony.

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  But there's something about the fact that a lot of my friends that can push themselves in many other areas still have as their, one of the final bastions of challenge is their avoidant attachment.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, it's the big one.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  You think that's the, whatever the Achilles heel?

• 50:29Speaker 00

  It's not the, I mean, everybody's got their own thing, you know, but that's, I think, relationship

• 50:36Speaker 00

  is one of the ultimate reflections upon yourself, you know, and getting into deeper awareness or more authentic awareness with your relationship to your parents. And I think a lot of it comes back to that. You're like, okay, interesting, you know? And so if you do allow, if you, you know, if you do play the game and you actually say like, cool, like, all right, pushing chips in, you know, and, and actually be there for it. Um, yeah, I mean, if, if you really, how many people really want to look at themselves? Like, I think we all say that we do, but I think the, the only reason to be afraid

• 51:17Speaker 00

  of a psychedelic trip, or maybe a relationship, or, you know, psychedelics are, are another really good example of that. Like, I think a, a bad trip, most people that I've talked to that have had bad trips, like I've had things that I deemed like, oh, that was felt pretty like bad. Um, it was just an exposure to some aspect of my, myself or my orientation to the world that I was uncomfortable with and I didn't want to look at. And I was in that time, in that, in that moment, I was kind of almost felt like forced to be in that, that space to say like, okay, here you are. Here's your relationship with, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the thing is. Um, and then wanting to get out. But the-

• 51:58Speaker 00

  The way to get to the other side of that and to, you know, finding like healing and ease and, you know, all of that holism health is through it.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  And it's, you can either, you know, wrestle the relationship or wrestle the mushroom or wrestle, you know, whatever, which you will not win.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  I've tried.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  I've had, I can guarantee, I can guarantee it with, with, with the mushroom. You will not win.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  The analogy that I used was it's like being sat on a firework. And as you try to steer it to the left or the right, it goes.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:34Chris Williamson?

  And just.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  It only makes, it only makes it worse. It only gets bigger.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't a good strategy.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  You know, it's like the, what's the, what's this, what's the, the gal with the snake heads? You chop off snake heads? Is that one? Which you got like tons of snake heads? You chop one off. Yeah, it's the Hydra.

• 52:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the Hydra. You know, so ultimately I'm trying to, you know, hopefully not getting like excessively metaphysical or esoteric, but you know, ultimately I think a, a relationship is an opportunity. You know, just like a, like a, like, you know, the mushroom thing is surrender. In my experience, surrender has been the ticket to ease, you know, like, like not fighting. You know, in that moment, it's like, cool, whatever the thing is, you don't need to fight. And it's interesting. Have you had that experience with yourself at all? Wrestle, wrestling a thing and instead of fighting the thing, coming to a place of just like,

• 53:34Speaker 00

  you know what? Take me.

• 53:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, my first ever mushroom trip was precisely this, and I just refused to let go.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:43Chris Williamson?

  So for whatever, five hours, I just wrangled everything and just kept, kept that puppy kind of as under as much control as I could, which was just made for a very, very uncomfortable.

• 53:53Speaker 00

  So Terrence McKenna said, the only thing you can do, the only mistake you can make with, with psychedelics is not taking enough.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, that was five grams for my first ever time. And even with that, I was like, I'm a, I'm a fucking wrap you up in a big, big prison and see if I can hold on.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:09Chris Williamson?

  And I'm pretty much managed to, which is just like, looking back, but, but then you're not, you're not exactly super lucid at the time.

• 54:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't know, man. I, I certainly resonate with when you, when you think about being in the body, right? And you notice that you've been sat in a meeting or in a situation with someone and you've been tense. And then you kind of check in with yourself and you.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 54:33Chris Williamson?

  And everything just eases up a little bit. Or you open your gaze. The best cue that I've learned about this, I learned this this year from an embodiment coach is about just using the peripherals of your vision.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:44Chris Williamson?

  So just using that open gaze. And man, I love that cue so much. It just reminds me that look, there's so much more going on. You do not need to focus just there. You can have all of this beautiful vision outside of you.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's a whole chapter in the Align Method book about that.

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  All right, tell me.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Andrew, Andrew Huberman, who he's, you know, popularized a lot of these conversations last reason. He thankfully edited through the whole thing for me and kind of, you know, like pointed me in the right directions that, and I've, I owe so much to his mind and his, his research. But yeah, I mean, the way that you use your eyes, your, your eyes are continuous with your central nervous system, you know? So similarly, this is one of the things I was, I was going to eventually likely get to in relation to environmental conditions. Changing the visual environment isn't just adding visual cues that cause you to do what would look like mobility or exercise. It's also changing the, the visual environment in the sense of like, you know, open some windows.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Ideally, get full spectrum light into your eyeballs, you know? So it's not just when you're, when you're looking at light through windows, it's going to be blocking some percentage of, of the either UVA or UVB spectrum out. And being able to relax your eyes and awareness that when I am in that panoramic, like, I'm just taking it all in, that, that's lens of perception. It's sending.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  A signal into the rest of your physiology, which is probably an anchored pattern for, again, millennia back like, you know, generations, generations, like forever, that when you are just taking it all in, just spacing out, probably almost never in history have you just spaced it out and taken it all in and been under attack. Right? And so it's a similar thing talking, and then when you're myopically focused in, suddenly, okay, cool, we're taking it all in, we're just gathering information about the whole, or maybe not gathering information, screw that, we're just, ah, we're just basking in the moment. We're fed, you know, we've hunted, whoa. And then suddenly there is a threat. What do your eyes do? You know, it all focuses in on that single point.

• 56:55Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking about this to do with smartphones.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Oh, of course.

• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  So much of our time.

• 56:59Speaker 00

  You're looking down, and you're looking down and to the right, you know, so you're looking down, or, you know, if you're lefty, you know, which would be more rare, but you're looking down into a specific direction. So your eyes act like reins to your neuromuscular system. So you can do this, you know, put your, your fingertips back, the bottom of your skull, it's called the suboccipital ridge, and just look up and down, and you'll feel those muscles, it's called suboccipital muscles engaging, right? Yeah, so your eyes, it's the same thing in, in, um, it was in chimpanzees, this has been researched, their, the cochlea in their ear will change direction with the eyes.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  So when you are looking to the right, to, to some potential threat or whatever the thing is, literally even their, their auditory system.

• 57:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so their hearing opens up as their eyes move almost.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  It will, it will orient towards that thing.

• 57:56Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Which is kind of an interesting thing for people that are like, you know, into jujitsu and wrestling and have like cauliflower ear, I wonder how that affects, affects things, but.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, your visual system is so deeply tied into your sense of either alertness or executive function, get her done, or relax, digest, rest. So that's in the book, in the Align Method, that really, the intention of it isn't so much to have like a step-by-step method. It's more a philosophy to reorient the way that a person engages with their body in any situation. So are you familiar with Viktor Frankl? Yes. Logotherapy, Man's Search for Meaning?

• 58:47Speaker 00

  One of the things that he said that I align with is that he said he's more like an optometrist than like a psychologist. So he's just, he's just working with people's perception of the world, the way that they process information, their filter. And so I think that that's a really valuable approach to one's fitness. Fitness isn't a thing that I do, fitness is a thing that I am. So all the time throughout every day, they're all a bunch of opportunities if you have the education on how to engage with those opportunities. So you're just filled with these fun levers all over your body. So your eyes, they will change the way that your mental, emotional state based off of the way that you use them.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  If you have that information, you can leverage it. Same thing with your auditory environment, same thing with your, you know, the sense of touch. Certain sensations or textures will make you feel one way, certain sensations and textures will make you feel another way. Your visual environment, an interesting thing that you have to fact check this one, but I heard with real estate, if you're selling a place and you have like pointy plants out front, that sends an indication to potential buyers to stay away. No way. I mean, you gotta look it up. There's a whole field of state you'd probably appreciate called embodied cognition. Embodied cognition essentially is the way that we think and feel based off of our physical

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  experience. So I'm sure you've heard of like the clipboard studies, you know, where if you give somebody your resume and it's on like a big, thick beefcake clipboard, they're like, oh, fuck, yeah, like this guy's really knows, you know, he's serious, you know, he's stable, he's supported, I like this guy.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Right? If you, and so that's that tactile experience of like, man, this guy feels like, oh, I can trust him. All right. Same thing with, you know, people that are, tend to be taller, lower voices is something we were talking about before. It's like, oh, I got something trustworthy about that. Like, it feels like, I feel powerful. They're like, they might just be a tall asshole. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. But the way that we cognate that or the, or our embodied experience of that is like, oh, yeah, I trust it. And the same thing with if we're, we have a cold beverage and someone goes into a job interview or a warm beverage. Right now, we had icy, you know, whatever, some, some lemonades or something like that, but like icy cups. Based off of

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  research, we would perceive this experience as being a little bit more, that's why I was noticing the temperature of the room. We perceive this experience as being a little bit, kind of like more closed, a little bit colder. If you give me like a hot cocoa and it's warm and we got a fire going in the background and we can hear the crackling of the fire, suddenly that's changing my perception to say like, wow, man, I just feel so safe here. There's something about you, Chris, that makes me feel safe. It's like, is it me or is it just the environment that we're having this mutual experience? Shit's crazy, man.

• 1:01:53Chris Williamson?

  This more holistic view of the body overall and of fitness is something that, I don't know, maybe to you and maybe the people that you're speaking to, it's kind of, how would you say, obvious or it makes a complete amount of sense. But to me, this is like an entire new world.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  A whole new world.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  It makes sense, though. It's simple.

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, the human system, the human system is, is one thing altogether. It's broken up into component parts, but working on each component part without taking into account all of the other things doesn't really seem to make sense. And some of the things that you've mentioned to me since we've been hanging out to do with, you can tell a lot about a person's personality by the way that they move, where they walk into a sauna or a restaurant or to sit down at a date or the way that they hold themselves or the way that they gesture or whatever, right?

• 1:02:45Chris Williamson?

  That why? Why is that the case? If it wasn't that we were such a global system where our cognition and our physicality and our emotions and our social status and our confidence and our blah blah. If it wasn't the case that all of those were together. Why would it be that from something I can induce how somebody is in a completely unrelated area, so to speak?

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  It's not. It's the one closed system.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Chris Williamson?

  So you've got a special revised paperback edition.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  Of the Align Method coming out. Where can people get that?

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  Well, I hopefully your bookstore would be great. That'd be very Align Method-esque of you to take a walk outside, ideally remove sunglasses, you know, get full spectrum light.

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  There's a lot of British people listening. They don't need sunglasses at the moment.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's it. I mean, it tunes your, your neurochemistry, you know, that, that light penetrating your eyeballs. A reason that I know that that was a cue to wrap up. So don't say, don't spout more, more factoids.

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Fire, fire away, man. Factoids, we're here for the factoids. Fucking keep them coming.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  But you're a, a big reason that, that such a high percentage of, of people are becoming myopic, you know, specifically like China, something like 93%, like a really high percentage of adolescents are becoming myopic.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  Same thing.

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  How do you define myopic?

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Near sighted.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, we, we see near well, far not so easy. So one potential conversation there would be that we're just practicing near sightedness all the time. So those silly area muscles and all the muscles that help change the shape of the lens, be able to refract that light. So it comes into clear vision. We're like, well, you're only using the close ones. So you're going to have a problem with the other ones. But a, a bigger part of the conversation is, is the, the impact that natural sunlight has on the, the structure and the shape and the, the chemical structural makeup of your eyeballs. So sun, it literally, the exact process, I can't go through because I'm, you know, that's not like my, my specialty. But sun, literally it changes, it, it's, you know, it's a physical thing.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  It's like a nutrient, you know, and it changes the structure and the makeup of. Of your eyes. And so when you're going outside, it's not just like a relax the eyes. You know, it's an opportunity to down regulate the nervous system or calm the freak down. It's literally, it's like you're nourishing the structure of your eyeballs through that exposure to the sunlight. And so sunlight, it just, it's so healing in so many capacities. And I know I didn't, you know, break down exactly what's happening within that system. So maybe come back, I'll go deeper in the research of what that system is exactly. But experts pretty much unanimously align that sunlight, it changes the structure and the makeup of your eyeballs.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  And so you need it for healthy eyes. You need it for healthy everything.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Doing a morning walk here in Austin, because the weather tends to be, it's a bit muggy sometimes on the morning, but maybe 50% of the days it's sunny.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  A morning walk with sunshine is so good. I always do the walk anyway, but in the UK, if I was to do it at the time I'm doing out here, it would still be dark.

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  And that infrared light specifically in the morning, you're setting, and I think a lot of people listen to this, but you know, by now they know about this. But you're setting the circadian rhythm for the rest of the day. So when you're waking up, that that light and the sun's first coming up, it's tuning your whole neurophysiology, your neurochemistry, your hormones, your endocrine system to be alert, to be up. You know, it's like this, it's, it's, it's like the, it's a, it's a bookend start of the day.

• 1:06:24Chris Williamson?

  I only learned recently that the reason that we get a burst of energy after the lights go out is that that would be adaptive for our ancestors to get themselves home while the sun was setting.

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  Hmm. That's cool. I never heard that.

• 1:06:38Chris Williamson?

  So this is in Johann Hari's Stolen Focus, which is coming out in the new year. It'll be really good. I've read half of it. And he mentioned that one of the reasons that we're struggling to have attention at the moment is because of a lack of sleep. And the lack of sleep is partly due to the fact that we use blue screens at night. But what is the reason that blue screens have such an effect on our energy levels and our ability to fall asleep easily? And one of the proposed reasons for this is that when we go from light to dark, our bodies get a kick of energy. Why would that be useful? Well, if you're out hunting or not in your cave or not at your camp, it would be pretty good for you to just get a little extra kick.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  I've had that experience many times. Like camping or, you know, rock climbing or something where you're out in the woods.

• 1:07:29Chris Williamson?

  The sun sets.

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  And the sun goes down, you're like, we gotta go.

• 1:07:32Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  Suddenly we're running, you know, and you get that, that full sympathetic burst to like, you gotta get to where we're going to say, I never thought about that.

• 1:07:41Chris Williamson?

  What Johan's saying is that, let's say that you're using your phone and watching Netflix until you go to sleep and then precisely at the moment when you're about to try and sleep.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  Get a little juice up.

• 1:07:49Chris Williamson?

  Precisely.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  That's really fascinating.

• 1:07:51Chris Williamson?

  Some interesting stats around e-readers that it doesn't seem like they have the same sort of response.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're not emitting that light.

• 1:07:57Chris Williamson?

  I need to speak to human about that, but I don't think that they have the same effect.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  The other thing that's interesting that I wanted to, to mention in relation to eyes that are just, I think is just so cool, is that humans are one of the only mammals to have white scleris, that the white part. So we can see the orientation and the positioning of our eyes. It's called the, they call it the eye, eye coordination hypothesis, I think is the, like the 50 cent.

• 1:08:25Chris Williamson?

  So that we can see, other people can see what we're looking at.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so the, the, the potential suggestion for that, like a, like an evolutionary adaptation would be to be able to signal to each other for hunting, you know, and so you'll see this. And the reason they would suggest is, is you see this with, with certain dogs, so like more like pack animals. They also have that indication to be able to see where their eyes are oriented. And then also to be able to see the, the wellness of a person. You know, so this is, becomes interesting in the whole, you know, like the, the year of the lockdowns and everything. It's like, we have, we're pretty good senses when someone's unwell. Like, you know, and that's, that's body language, that's voice tonality, that's

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  reading the scleris of somebody's eyes. That's, you know, we go Chinese medicine route and you know, see the, what's the, they have like some furry stuff on their tongue or their cracks in their tongue. We have all of these millions or billions of bits of visual information and olfact, olfactory information as well, the way we smell, suggesting whether that person is healthy to be close to. Somebody has terrible breath. You're like, get the hell away from me. Terrible body odor. You're like, please don't give me a hug.

• 1:09:37Chris Williamson?

  No, thank you.

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  If someone's sniffling, you're like, not interested. If someone's got bloodshot eyes or they have like yellow eyes, you're like, I don't know what's going on. Is this hepatitis? Is this like, there's something going on here. I would love for you to visit a doctor. I love you, you know, but you need to go. You gotta sort this out and then come back to the tribe. And then even if within yourself, if you are that guy or that girl, you're like, okay, I need to pull myself out of the tribe.

• 1:10:10Chris Williamson?

  Self-regulatory.

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  I need to sort this out, you know, and so our subconscious intuition is just so fucking cool. We've just learned to, you know, kind of outsmart ourselves and you will never outsmart yourself. It's the same concept of trying to put together your 640 muscles and your 360 joints. You will not be successful, but if you allow yourself to kind of listen to that inner wisdom, you know, and the integration of the inner wisdom and the modern wisdom, ultimately the modern wisdom would be that the inner wisdom.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  I think suddenly it's like maybe surrendering to that, which is a surrendering term. I think that's, that can be kind of funny for some people. But behind that, that's, I think that's where true wisdom is.

• 1:10:58Chris Williamson?

  Aaron Alexander, ladies and gentlemen, Align Podcast, Align Method book. Everything will be linked in the show notes below. Any other stuff that people should check out?

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  No, I think that's it. I mean, thanks again for making this happen, man. I really enjoyed this. It was a really, really fun conversation. I appreciate the way that your mind operates and the way that you create space for other minds to, to turn the way that they do. So thank you for creating the space for this.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, go check out the Align Podcast with you. I really enjoyed that conversation.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  Another one they could check out would be the Bruce Lipton conversation. They want to go deeper into some of these topics. And then the Align Method book is coming out January 11th. And so they could get it. This is before that. They can preorder it. It's on Amazon or Barnes and Nobles or whatever. And I think that's it, man. I appreciate you.

• 1:11:50Chris Williamson?

  Awesome, dude. First of many.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's keep doing it.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

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