What is being spoken about with MAHA is a great starting point. However, this has been going on for a very long time, it’s nothing new. So while some of it needs to happen, it’s not going to solve the health crisis’ we have unless we begin to get to the core of what’s causing so many health issues.
In this episode:
– A quick outline of the MAHA movement.
– A breakdown of the key missing piece in the process of becoming healthy again.
– How nervous system dysregulation creates chronic illness and does not allow the body to repair well.
– How we have lost touch with our needs and DNA as a human species and why it’s the key to becoming healthy.
Start here for some nervous system resources: https://irenelyon.com/healing-trauma
Listen To The Episode
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Transcript
So I know we’ve been chatting about this idea, that’s out there in a big way. This Make America Healthy again.
Irene Lyon: Right.
Joe Martino: I mean, you see Trump there and RFK has kind of been the one that’s, that’s come in and offered that to the campaign. And we’re also seeing this Casey Means. And this, I think it’s Kayla Kelly.
Irene Lyon: Means, Cali and Casey. Yes. Brother and sister.
Joe Martino: Yeah. And they’ve been going around in the podcast sphere talking a lot about nutrition and soil health and all these really, really important details. and all this is great in service of trying to make America, or let’s just say the world in essence, healthier again.
Irene Lyon: The world, yeah.
Joe Martino: but you know, you’ve brought up some interesting points about kind of what’s missing from that conversation. That may be enough of a foundational piece that if we avoid it, these sort of external policy changes and actions on the ground may not make as much of a difference as we’re hoping.
And why don’t we start there and you can kind of break that down a bit.
Irene Lyon: I have so much to say about this. Some people don’t know this and this might. We might post this on my channel. I’m not sure I’d like to. So my background is actually in nutrition and exercise physiology and biomedical science and applied health and human nutrition. Most people don’t know that. They just see me as the trauma somatic person, which I am. But I studied that hardcore health science for. From 1993 to 2008. So that’s a lot of years. And there’s a few stories. So first of all, I was introduced to Casey, who is the sister surgeon Stanford trained. One of my staff members sent me a, ah, podcast she was on. It was actually with Jay Shetty. And I kind of reluctantly listened to it because I’m not a big fan of his. But I’m like, okay, I’m here to listen to her and hear what she has to say. And her book is called Good Energy. And this was before she started to explode, which was not too long ago. And, I listened and it was great. I’m like, oh, great. She’s talking about metabolic health, she’s talking about mitochondrial health. She’s talking about our poor food supply. And when I say our, I’m going to say North America, Although I do know the United States is worse. we just know that, because of the things that are not banned in their foods, where they’re banned here and in most other countries are considered poisons. so everything was great. But there was a moment in that interview, and I don’t know if it was that one. I think it might have been on Tucker Carlson, because then I listened. I’m like, oh, she’s on Tucker with this other guy. Oh, it’s her brother. He was a lobbyist in D.C. working for big friggin Food. And so he’s out of that. And now he’s kind of being the whistleblower on how these things work. And I wish I could say I was shocked by what I heard on Tucker’s because I felt that Tucker’s interview was way better than Jay’s because it just got into the. I mean, he’s a real journalist, so he knows how to ask the right questions. And, A, I recommend everybody watch it if you don’t understand how corrupt things are in the food industry. But secondly, at, ah, one point, Callie, and this is not a hit against her. I hope to meet her one day. She is like, we just need to replace all the food in America with healthy food, whole food, clean food, no toxins, blah, blah, blah. And so I did a little mind game with myself and I’m like, okay, imagine if like in a magical fairy tale, like I Dream of Genie or, you know, Wandavision or something like that, all of a sudden every single household in North America has no more junk. There’s fresh food. Maybe the only thing packaged is, you know, whole grain rice, olive oil, salt, pepper, herbs, like the things that we know we use cans of good tomatoes. Most people will wake up and not know what the hell to do with that stuff.
Joe Martino: Yep.
Irene Lyon: And yet they know, ah, this is the whole food thing. This is the healthy food thing. I know this is important for me. And maybe they want to eat it, but they won’t. Know what to do with it.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And this issue is bigger than what we have time for in today’s talk, but it comes back to us for the most part. And I generalize because I knew how to cook and clean and do all the things when I was really young, just because of my upbringing. But most kids don’t know how to cook. M. And how to take a potato and a package of ground beef and some onions and some salt and pepper and put some vegetables in it and make it a real meal. Like, most wouldn’t know what to do with that. So I’m like, I get your point, and I think it’s a great point. But then we need to teach people how to use this food. But we also have to ask the question, why are people not realizing that what they’re eating is junk?
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And not good for them.
Joe Martino: Yeah. Because that should be almost like a little bit of an inherent understanding. you know, and I think in one of the pieces, she said something to the effect. Effect of, you know, there’s no other species with obesity and chronic disease epidemics. Right. There’s no other animal. And that’s true. And it’s like, well, you know, you could say, well, yeah, it’s because our food quality is not great. And it’s not the quality of food. It’s not the right food for the cells that. That are trying to proliferate and do good things in the human body. Which is all true, but it’s also, there’s something going on with food choices and how we not just become addicted because we’ve been fed them a lot, but there’s something that actually doesn’t even allow us to realize how harmful it is. There’s a disconnect from.
Irene Lyon: Yeah.
Joe Martino: Our own DNA. And that’s what I’m curious if you can continue to pick up on that.
Irene Lyon: Yeah, well, I mean, you mentioned no animals and no animals, you said get chronic disease and have obesity and metabolic syndrome. It’s like, well, animals in the wild, animals in captivity, animals that are domestic. Because having grown up in an animal hospital, as you know, my history, literally my parents were both veterinarians. That whole practice was run off of sick animals, you know, with the exception of the normal things like parvo vaccines and rabies vaccines and checkups and teeth pulling and all that. But, you know, if you have an, infected tooth in the wild that might recover or it might be the end of you, you know, and so there’s an interesting thing that you would see in small veterinary practice. Really sick animals. And we also know we’re starting to realize they’re eating terrible food. They’re eating kibble that they shouldn’t be eating, that’s filled with chemicals and isn’t raw food, meaning raw meat, which most animals should eat. And we’re actually seeing that change in some health areas with getting back to good animal protein and all that kind of thing. Good fats. Right. So to go back to your question, why are we not sniffing out, to use the example of, a dog sniffing out healthy food? It comes down to our interoception. So that’s a fancy word for our perception of our internal environment, which we need. It allows us to know, I’m hungry, I didn’t eat something good. It, also lets us know fear. Like, this isn’t a good safe situation. That whole concept of, you know, hair standing on the back of your neck and feeling your body go through, that flush of worry. but also, this food thing is interesting because when we’re really connected to our biology in a healthy way, we do seek out healthy, I hate to say options. Healthy food. And we’ve seen this, I’ve seen this with my students in my courses, teaching them nervous system regulation and capacity building. It isn’t an overnight switch. It slowly shifts. They start to realize their habitual behaviors of going for certain food preferences. It starts to shift slowly. Even for them. If you were to replace everything in their home with healthy options of everything, that would be too much of a stark contrast. And so they have to do it slowly. We would use the word titrated in a titrated, integrated way. So it isn’t feeling like a shock. But a lot of folks, their sensation, their senses to healthy food is completely numb, indulled. Not just because they’re eating high sugar and too much salts and all the additives and preservatives. It is a portion of their nervous system being dysregulated.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And them just not knowing that this isn’t good for me.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: I watched a video a long time ago, well, not long, like a couple months ago, where I think it was a, some animal in the wild. It was like a cat, a big cat. And this guy was trying to feed it like a hamburger, like a, fast food burger, you know, with the bun and the meat and the pickle and the onion and the animal just like it would touch it. And then I think they showed them him having. Or she having raw. Raw meat and eats it right away. So they know, like, they know because they’re integrated with their system. And then, of course, the story that we know is when you have a ton of stored survival stress and a ton of nervous system dysregulation, which, as we know, comes from often early trauma, adversity, transgenerational trauma, all these things, we’re just disconnected from what we need. And we know this because people get into bad relationships, bad jobs, they don’t choose good health practices. And this is the other thing that often gets missed on a lot of these shows. And again, I fully respect the podcast industry that’s really giving a lot of this information out and teaching people. But the common thing is, oh, the person is unwell and sick because they’re lazy and they just can’t do anything, and they’re lazy. It’s like, that’s true in some cases, but it also is indicative of a very shutdown and collapsed nervous system physiology where they actually don’t have the energy. And this comes back to what, Casey, was saying about metabolic health, mitochondrial health. And it’s true they don’t have the energy to drive their bodies to get up and move, to be outside, to be vigorous. But when you have been kind of anesthetized, and I use that as a metaphor, with this functional freeze and the shutdown of the nervous system, you, can put the best hiking trail and the most beautiful ocean and the best gym and everything in front of a person, but they will not be able to get up and use it.
Joe Martino: Yeah, yeah.
And I think the interesting thing about this, too. Cause I’d like to go in a little bit to the ACE study in a second. And I’d like you to break that down, because whether it was the Joe Rogan clip that we were talking about or whether you see it in this, there’s this question of, like, you know, yeah, just what holds people back from doing it? Why are some people more prone to addiction than others? Whether that’s food addiction or any other? But I want to contextualize here a little bit, because, you know what? We saw a lot back in the day, I mean, with collective evolution, we used to write a lot about health. Right. We saw that as one of the biggest inlets to holding a shift in a person was by providing a healthier diet. Right. And it was kind of one of the foundational pieces. And, you know, I now see that there are some other pieces too, that are really, really important, like the nervous system stuff. But in the realm of doing all that and having such large audiences and being able to hear from so many people. I mean, we would provide all the science, all the studies, all the different possible recipes, all the different, all the different things. We wrote everything right. And you would still see that sometimes people could get on a track for maybe three months and then just totally fall off. And it always felt like the emotions, the ability for the willpower to maintain, to change the diet, it was like they were always fighting their physiology by trying to eat healthy. And I think this is the piece that’s so important and I’d love for you to kind of pick it up from there and what trauma says about that fighting the physiology and where the ACE study plays into this.
Irene Lyon: Yeah. So a quick story before I get into that research. as I mentioned, when I was working in fitness and nutrition, I was literally that person meeting with a new client at the gym. I worked in like five gyms in my 20s, into my early 30s. And you know, you do the intake, I would do the full on assessment, like fat, calipers, weight, the stupid tests that we do, you know, like flexibility, grip strength isn’t stupid. That’s actually a really, accurate indicator of strength. So I would do all these things and then I’m like, what are your goals? And let’s write them out and we need strength and here’s your program. And then I give them a little piece of paper that they put in the thing at the gym where they find their name and they do their program. And I can tell you, Joe, each year we as fitness trainers had to clear out that program, file because people like you said they would start for a few weeks and then you’d see it just, it went out the window. And I would spend all this time teaching them how to do the exercises and monitoring their heart rate and form and function and flexibility and boom, gone. And so this was one reason why I’m like, I can’t be in this industry anymore because I’m actually not impacting any change. and so then I was like, what am I missing? And obviously I know and you’ve experienced this seeing, you know, some of the people that I’m around and my students, it was the nervous system piece. It was their lack of full functional regulation of their autonomic nervous system. And so, and even just the other day, I was listening to Huberman talk on a pod or his podcast, interviewing someone, I can’t remember who, and he even said, I believe that a lot of these problems are autonomic dysregulation. I was like, oh my God, you Actually finally said it. And then he said, but I’m not, not sure how to deal with that. I’m like, oh, my God, have me on your podcast. I can tell you how. Right. So it’s starting to creep up there.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: But the ACE study, The ACE study, it stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. This was uncovered by accident in the late 80s when, interestingly enough, it was an American insurance company, the kaiser Permanente in SoCal in Southern California. It was La Jolla. They were doing an intervention with, I believe it was obese patients in their Health initiative. And they’re like, let’s help them get healthier. Right. And. And again, this whole idea of make America healthy again, this has been a thing for a long time. This isn’t new.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And so the doctor, his name is Vincent Felitti. He’s still alive. You know, him and his team, huge intervention, exercise, diet, nutrition counseling support, all the things. It was really good. People lost a lot of weight, like hundreds of pounds. and they were tracking them and then they noticed that these people disappeared. And I’m really shortening the essence of this story. They disappeared, like, what happened? Where did everybody go? And so they did a follow up. Long story short, turns out that a lot of these people, if not all of them, when they studied and interviewed and surveyed them, had had some form of adversity, growing up, abuse, parent that was addicted, a parent that was sick, a parent that was incarcerated, divorce, emotional abuse, living in poverty. There’s sort of a 10 point questionnaire that you can go online and get your ACE score. And so what they started to see, and they had thousands, like it was tens of thousands of data points. And they showed that with every ace, with every adversity growing up or in infancy, childhood, your likelihood of having a chronic disease went up almost exponentially. It was like two thirds, I think, of this population showed signs of, adversity, and then of course, being chronically ill later in life. So that kind of brought this connection with early adversity, early stress, dysregulation and chronic illness later in life. And this isn’t just like fibromyalgia and autoimmune. The list was long. It was certain cancers, certain heart disease problems, addictions, IV drug use, things that you wouldn’t think are connected. Osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. And some of the critique around the ACE study, because I’ve seen it, is, oh, but they don’t talk about, birth trauma and they don’t talk about surgical trauma, and they don’t talk about transgenerational or in utero trauma. Like I get it, you guys, it’s one study. They had to start somewhere. Yeah, but we know these little people growing up in that kind of adversity are living in a state of fight flight, freeze. And if it persists, you go into this high tone dorsal shutdown collapse. And that is what breeds these chronic illnesses, these metabolic dysfunctions. You add in a shitty food supply and access to really bad addictive types of food, and you have a recipe for disaster. And that’s, I think, what we’re seeing. Because when you have adversity, let’s just take someone who literally had abuse, poor household, no attunement, with, say, mother or father. You are not building what’s called a healthy social engagement system. It’s part of our parasympathetic nervous system. And you’re not building a healthy ability to self soothe.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And you need that self soothing, which is at the autonomic nervous system level. This isn’t thought based. This isn’t a mo. This is not emotional intelligence. You don’t build those wires. They have to be myelinated in the first three years of life. So this is like real neuroscience happening.
Joe Sutter says autonomic dysregulation may be at play in addiction
And if you don’t get those wires built, you don’t know how to self sue. So what do you do? You go to the food, you go to the drugs, you go to the adrenaline sports, you go to being a perfect student. Right. To have control. And so there is a very strong correlation connection. I’m going to just say to me it’s factual because I’ve worked with enough people with addiction and they’re like, yeah, this has nothing to do with genetics. This has to do with what we might call epigenetics. M and how I was taught from a young age to take care of myself. And for most people, they weren’t taught.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: They were just left to their own devices to figure out how to move through life. They were not resilient. They were adapted. They adapted to the circumstance. And what that adaptation offered was this false sense of, we, would call window of tolerance, this false sense of resiliency. but sooner or later, Joe, the system breaks down and that’s where we get the chronic illness, because we’re not. It’s like the fire is still burning. We’re trying to put out the fire on the roof, but the fire is happening in the furnace at the basement. It’s like we got to get to that root cause. Not the little bits of smoke that are coming out from the windows, for example.
Joe Martino: Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of this is moving from this idea of, you know, it’s beautiful that we’re still here and surviving as human beings, having some of us having gone through crazy things, and that’s great, and that’s, you know, important to celebrate. But at the same time, what I think we’re realizing with all of this stuff is just how widespread and collective autonomic dysregulation truly is. And when you begin to understand it and how it comes to be, and then you look at the way our world is designed and you look at all of these things, you start to realize, well, yeah, of course, you know, a lot of us are struggling with this because, yeah, it’s. It’s such a big part of our collective society, and we’ve unfortunately deemed it as normal. So it goes back to that statement you made where it’s like, you know, hey, you know, I’m. I’m still. I’m surviving. I’m still here. And like, I’m in my. That false window of tolerance of just because I’m here and I’m okay. That. That’s me being okay. That’s my baseline. And, yeah, the thing that I wanted to add to this, that I think contextualizes it for the people that eat really, really well, have all the great food and all the great things. I’ve seen people again in this journey of ce, where they’re eating everything right, they’re doing it all exactly as they’re supposed to, and yet they still have severe digestive issues, and they still have severe. Insert, whatever it might be. And that tells you that it’s not just the food, that there’s something else going on. And perhaps you can just for the sake of it, offer what, autonomic dysregulation may be at play in that portion of the equation.
Irene Lyon: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard a student or a client when I was in private practice say, I have cleaned everything up in my diet. And this is why I really hope those folks get wind of this, information that we’ve known for a long time. You know, this isn’t just me making this up. I sent you, before we started, a passage from Bessel van der Kolk’s book, the Body Keeps the Score, where he is recounting hearing a head, one of the heads back in the day of the CDC breaking down in tears when he saw the ACE study Research because he was in tobacco and all this, like helping clean up that stuff. And he’s like, childhood adversity is beyond the problems that we saw in these other health crises. It’s like you can’t even put a number on it.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And so what happens when you have this autonomic nervous system dysregulation and you’re stuck in this fight flight freeze, and then we would call collapse shutdown. A, a person might not even know, like you said, they’re in it because it’s just, it’s like the fish in the fishbowl that has poison. Like they just don’t know that they’re in it. they think this is how life is. And I’ve worked with some folks that are like, what you mean? Not everybody wakes up in chronic pain. Like, I thought that was just normal or not everybody has a heart racing the moment they talk to someone. You know, on the street. I thought that was normal. What you mean diarrhea constantly isn’t normal? Constipation isn’t normal? Like, so what happens, ah, at a quick level is when we’re in this dysregulation, there’s a portion of our nervous system and I’ll name it for accuracy, it’s the true rest digest of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is called the low tone dorsal of the vagus nerve. One of the confusion parts is people think parasympathetic is just rest digest. It’s not. It’s also shut down. It’s high tone dorsal of the vagus nerve creates the collapse. So when you’ve been living a life of adversity and yes, you survived. This is why I don’t like the word, I’m a survivor. It’s like, yes, we all survived, but what’s happening in your system? Are you thriving? Are you regulated? So when you’re in this survival mode still, and you’re kind of verging on always being in this collapse state with fight flight and freeze is still under that the real rest digest the tone that needs to ooze into your guts and your immune system, it isn’t happening. When you rest at night, it doesn’t even happen when you’re on holiday, having a chill session in the Caribbean, you know, getting all the sunshine and all the good food in the world, the system is still on what we would call this lockdown of shutdown. And so the immune system is not being repaired at night. The gut is not what’s called barrier keeping. It’s not Stitching up at night, it’s not. It’s not. It’s not recovering. cell repair isn’t happening. And. And the thing that’s interesting is a lot of these folks that we’re listening to, they’re talking about mitochondrial health.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And autophagy and cellular metabolism and immune function. But again, if you are locked in this collapse shutdown, but functional, because a lot of people are, you don’t realize that while you’re sleeping at night, you’re actually not repairing because you’re in that high tone dorsal of the parasympathetic. And this is what happens to the people who say, I have my bath at night. I’m eating my good food, I’m not having any caffeine, I’m getting all these things. Why can I still not sleep? Or why do I go to sleep and I wake up and I don’t feel rested? The answer is you’re still living in a very deep, we would call functional freeze state or this high tone dorsal collapse. And the system has no chance to repair because that baseline autonomic nervous system physiology is still thinking you’re under threat.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And when you were brought up. And, again, I need to be clear. This isn’t because people say, I was taken care of. I had a roof over my house. I had food in the fridge.
I had soccer practice and I had all the school supplies in the world. And I know you and I have a similar story around that. It’s like we were provided for, but there was, like, an element of unsafety that we really couldn’t tell was there, and it puts us on edge. So this is indica. This is true for not just folks who knew they were in violence and abuse and neglect. That’s true. But this is even more true for those who had that good childhood, but they didn’t have attunement from their primary caregivers. And that puts us into a state of chronic stress that is actually, from my experience, harder to work with because there is this almost pride. And I’m fine. I, have no problems. I eat well, I exercise. And, yeah, I got these problems with my gut and my immune system. Yeah, I got this chronic, you know, disease. But it has nothing to do with my childhood because my childhood was good. So I’m gonna see that. And I think this, this is what connects with what these folks are saying. It connects to the medical system. Because even that person will go to the medical system and think that this condition is separate.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: From their. From these baseline Pieces. And it’s not. And again, we’ve seen people heal all sorts of things because they’re getting under the rug, so to speak.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
So many things I want to say to that, but, please, I will. The first thing I’ll say is this is why when you, know a lot of this stuff, it’s really important not to compare our traumas with each other and see who’s more strong. Because the interesting part about it is you can have somebody who on the surface looks like they had everything perfect and you have no idea what’s actually going on. And this is one of, unfortunately one of the societal, I want to say, challenges. It’s almost like we’re just misperceiving what it means to sort of be traumatized. And this is part of the new, I think you call it, and m. Perhaps it’s out there more. But I’ve only heard you refer to it as the new traumatology, which is kind of like understanding the new stuff we’re learning, but how that’s going to impact society from the standpoint of how we understand what it means to be traumatized. so I think that’s an important part of the education. I love the note. I always like to remind this to folks and when I talk to even clients about the idea of that your parasympathetic nervous system does have survival because people typically see fight and flight as survival. And so if they’re not experiencing that angsty anxiety ness, they think, well, I’m not in survival. But if you’re in that shutdown where you kind of feel relaxed, but you. It’s maybe not the quality of relaxation that you think you’re actually in survival. Right. And, yep, when you’re in survival, your body prioritizes survival, not rest and repair. Right. So these pieces are so key. so I’m glad you brought those up.
And what I wanted to sort of maybe end this off with, for, from. From your perspective is we kind of suggested and made the bold claim that maybe make America healthy again. Just as this overarching societal conversation right now is missing something. And it’s like, great. We know we’ve acknowledged that the soil health and the food health and the good nutrients, all that stuff is very, very important. But we gotta get down to this deeper level of autonomic dysregulation as well. Where could people start to think about what this would look like for them to engage this kind of work or this journey? given the fact that collectively this is where we are Right. Like where we are is in this state. Where do we start now?
Irene Lyon: Well, I think we need to applaud this concept of wanting humans to be healthy again with clean food, clean water, soil that is getting its biome back. I mean, this is all stuff that has been really popular in the last four to five years, which I think is really important. So that’s really important to just highlight. This is good.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: for people who, you know, are listening and they’re like, how do I start? I mean, here’s what’s so interesting. And I’ll do a roundabout to get back to this question. Vincent Felitti, who uncovered the ACE study, it’s worth watching. He has a, an 18 minute video on YouTube called, it’s a tribute to Vincent Felitti and he actually, it actually breaks the study down really well. So if someone wants to look at that in more detail, that’s a nice, easy layman’s way to see it. But he’s interviewed and in the interview he talks about how we’ve been know, we’ve known about this for a long time. And, and so what’s going on that’s not getting this into these Senate hearings. And as Robert Anda, who is one of the heads of the ACE study, said, around his work with the cdc, this is the biggest epidemic of all.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And what he surmised as has Gabor Matei, because Gabor Mate has talked about this. The crux with this work is you have to have people who have experienced this level of nervous system healing to be the spokespeople.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And you and I have spoken about this at length about many of the influencers in the biohacking field and the mindfulness field. High level fields are still very dysregulated at their core, and there’s no darn shame in that. Like, this is the other thing. This isn’t saying they’re bad and I’m good. It’s, not that everyone’s on their own journey, but until more of those high levels, high level people understand what this really means. It is very hard to teach this to other people. So from an individual level, for anyone listening to this, and they’re like, whoa, I would really like to understand how to get my autonomic nervous system more regulated. I mean, you have resources. I have a ton of resources. Courses, programs. That’s where I would start. It’s like you, but you have to have a fire in your belly to want it.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: Because this isn’t. This is. Yeah, go Ahead.
Joe Martino: I was gonna say just throw down even a few concepts of like, like the interoception piece, the self awareness piece, like just little bits so that there’s a little bit of like a journey. Yeah. People can dive into resources no problem.
Irene Lyon: Yeah.
Joe Martino: ah, but like a taste of some concepts.
Irene Lyon: So the, the concepts are so simple, it’s going to feel remedial and rudimentary. But things like following your biological impulse. So when you are needing to go to the bathroom, I know this seems super crude, go, I mean don’t just go, but like go to the toilet and that kind of thing. Right. Listen to when you hold back emotion, when you hold back a desire to speak up, when you’re tired, honor that and rest. When you’re hungry, eat. When you’re not hungry, don’t eat right. When you’re thirsty, have some water. These impulse, when you’re cold, warm up. When you’re hot, cool off. These are basic autonomic functions that as infants we need another adult to help us with. Right. This is why humans, are so dependent on a caregiver because of this high level of complexity in our system. So starting with those biological impulses, while it seems really simple, are a wonderful way to start to get connected to your autonomic nervous system physiology. The second thing would be again education. And again that doesn’t seem like a takeaway, quick tool. But because of our higher brains, we really do need to understand from my experience and my students experience how detailed our mammalian physiology is, what happens in our physiology. and then also know that when we do feel what we might consider anxiety or nervousness or tension that is coming from the core autonomic level, we might interpret it in our brain as awfulness and anxiety and depression, but it’s a physical sensation that’s manifesting as a result of something going on or our perception of the environment or old perceptions. So this ability to really listen, feel and go, oh, this is me, this is my body saying something. And to bridge it back to like to infants, when we’re teaching infants how to become self regulated, when they have a distress, when they’re crying, hungry, cold, scared, we sweet pick them up, we soothe them and that’s how they learn self regulation. So a portion of this work as adults is going back to that interoception, listening to our insides and attuning to ourselves and offering ourselves what we need so that we can find that soothing. and then learning about why and how this system connects in the way that it does. Yeah, hopefully that offers a little bit.
Joe Martino: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Because again, you talked about it being simple, and it is simple in many ways, especially where to start. And it’s really just coming back to acknowledging and being human, which, as crazy as it sounds, we are so divorced from. And when we talk about the influencers and some of that. And again, I don’t think any of them are trying to do bad things or whatever. No, it’s literally you don’t know what you don’t know. We’ve all had that experience of you don’t know what you don’t know. And you continue to expand and learn and grow. yeah. And this is one of those things where. This is why I think the education is so important is because I, for. I, for myself, like, I had a sense years ago that what I learned from my mentor, there was something missing and I was searching. And when I got, let’s just say, polyvagal education, I started to understand that. And I learned that from you. It was like, I get it now. That is the piece that is missing. That is, that was the piece that I have all this spiritual and practice and mindfulness and emotional intelligence and mindset stuff, and I have all this healthy eating at all these pieces. But the polyvagal piece was like, okay, everything now clicks, right? And this isn’t selling a modality, right?
Irene Lyon: No, that’s what’s so confusing.
Joe Martino: Yes, touch on that, please.
Irene Lyon: Yeah, no, I mean, so I just want to give, credit where credit is due.
So you mentioned the new traumatology that you, you heard me talk about. You just said it. That. That is the work of Stephen Porges, who uncovered the differing, the, the. The non. Reciprocal relationship of the autonomic nervous system. So the classic thing. And man, I still hear people like Huberman say this. The autonomic nervous system is, is fight, flight and rest digest. And he even still doesn’t understand, from what I can tell, these delineations of this new traumatology, which is not that recent. And so this concept of having a hierarchy, of nervous system response based on safety and threat, that was Porges work. And this ability for our system to modulate and regulate with more than just sympathetic and parasympathetic rest digest. So that’s the new traumatology, what you were mentioning a second ago, in terms of there not being a methodology, it’s kind of like saying, and I always use medicine as an example, which is kind of ironic considering a big part of what Callie and Casey means are kind of Hitting against is how the medical system is so corrupt and all this stuff. But they do say certain things are good, like orthopedics.
Joe Martino: Yeah, right.
Irene Lyon: Emergency medicine, infectious disease control, like, yep, those things are very much good parts of medicine. And of course there’s others, but just want to make that statement clear. but in medicine it isn’t just one method. Like medicine isn’t just internal surgery. Medicine isn’t just plastic surgery for burn victims. Medicine isn’t just neurology. It isn’t. It is this amassment of study and research and practice and longevity and collaboration, we would hope, and moving the needle ahead and forward for the health and the goodness of helping people be healthy and recover and not die and have life changing and life saving surgeries and all these things. So what’s happening right now, I feel in the, this new traumatology and we would, I hate to call it this, but the somatics world, because it’s way more than somatics is there’s this thought that healing our traumas at the nervous system level is done with one method m or one procedure, like one medical procedure. And it’s not again, if I use medicine, if you go into an operating arena and I’ve done this because I’ve had many, actually counted. I’ve had nine anesthesias and surgeries in my life. I was thinking about this yesterday. It’s like you’re not just being operated on by the doctor, by the surgeon. You have an anesthesiologist, you have a nurse, you have all the bells and whistles. There is a whole team in service of M1 Medical Surgery. So when we’re working with the nervous system and working with dysregulation of the nervous system, the path that we’re, I hope and I’m trying to verge people off of is this person has anxiety, therefore they need this. It’s like saying this person has chronic illness, therefore they need just exercise or they just need good food. Yeah, they probably do need exercise because we know we need exercise. And yeah, they do need good food because we need to feed the vessel. Feed the vessel, good stuff. Stuff. But there’s this other thing happening which is the reason they can’t exercise and they can’t eat good food is they are stuck in survival. But then the question is, well, why are they stuck in survival? Oh, it’s because they had a birth trauma and they were in a hospital for six weeks, plugged up to tubes and not being touched by their mother. And they were in constant states of Terror. That makes sense. How I would work with that person theoretically, is different and yet the same. This is where it gets complex than the person who grew up with coldness, no emotional connection, all the food in the world, no medical surgeries, no accidents. But they didn’t have life and goodness in their home. There wasn’t good social engagement. It was all about reward and achievement and being that perfect student to get to an Ivy League school and be on the sports team, team and blah, blah, blah. So they might come into the world and they will then get complex PTSD and an autoimmune condition. That same kid that had the surgeries at birth might also have complex PTSD and an autoimmune condition in their 30s. So at, the core, it is the dysregulation of their nervous system. But how you approach and work with that is going to be totally different when you get to the more nitty gritty. Because it isn’t just. It’s too complex. And this is where, I mean, as I start to train people to do this stuff, I am, almost awestruck by how much information and how much practical information and how much observation I got, God willing, with all the trainers I worked with, to see all these different varieties of how you would work with someone like a good medical degree. And I’m like, thinking, okay, how do we create a new line of teachers and practitioners where they’re not just, it’s like, I’m just an sep, or I’m just a Feldenkraisch practitioner, or I’m just a breathwork facilitator. If you really want to have deep, deep ability to help people at all these complexities and all the diversity of how they were raised or not raised, well, you need to teach all of the things. And that’s. That’s my speech on there is no one method. God, I wish there was. Wouldn’t that be easy if there was just the equivalent of like a root canal?
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: You know, in dentistry, like, yeah, that’s all we need to do for this thing. And you’re out, you’re good. You’ll be good as new in two weeks. And we know that that’s just not the case. And that, Joe, is why I think speculating here, this piece is so slow to infiltrate and get into that mainstream. Because it’s not as simple as just replacing all the food.
Joe Martino: No.
Irene Lyon: And that’s the part.
Joe Martino: Sorry.
Irene Lyon: that’s the part that I don’t want to say it worries me, but I know having been in this industry, working with people with their health, it is not enough to just give them the things.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: They have to have an internal desire to want the things and know why. Yeah, they want the things. And if they’re still in survival, like you said, all the good food in the world, it’ll help a little bit, but then their health is just going to drop back down.
Joe Martino: Yeah. We have a tendency as beings to want everything to be simple. And our world incentivizes that. It incentivizes simplicity, predictability and insurability. Right. Because if something is those things, they can insure it. And if it can be insured, it can grow and expand and have all that. And I mean, you watch this happening with the psychedelic world right now.
Irene Lyon: Oh my goodness.
Joe Martino: Psychedelics are going to have a very specific place. That’s my, that’s my view since 2009 when I started writing about it.
Irene Lyon: Yep, yep.
Joe Martino: And it’s my view now. But people see it as it’s going to be the thing. And the reality is, and this is my honest observation over 15 years is I’ve watched hundreds of people do it and I could maybe, maybe count on one hand how many people it’s honestly, truly worked for from the standpoint of doing something that’s like, ah, that’s a lasting change. You’ve built something there, Right. Because it’s not going to heal them fully. But it’s like, ah, that’s a. You built something that is a lasting change and you’re going to keep building maybe a hand, maybe a handful, maybe not even.
Irene Lyon: And I know one.
Joe Martino: You, know one.
Irene Lyon: I know one person who had a, very good positive experience with a plant medicine.
North: Plant medicines and psychedelics are the way forward
But, he also knew I need to take this experience and integrate it for a long time.
Joe Martino: Yeah. And, and my whole point in saying that is really, just to bring up this idea that, like, there isn’t going to be one thing. It’s tough to go all in on one thing. And we have these tendencies to get into trends where we’re looking for that magic pill and society may keep doing that for a long time. But if we get into this education of stuff, right. Which is really, it’s just understanding what a human being is. Right.
Irene Lyon: yes.
Joe Martino: Then maybe we start seeing that, when we, let’s say we decide, oh, I really want to go into a psychedelic thing, if you have a lot of these tools and a lot of these things on board, maybe you get more out of it, maybe not. Maybe you decide, hey, I don’t even need to because now I know how to work with stuff in a different way. Right. and I think that is one thing that really needs to go out there because unfortunately, and I think maybe you maybe don’t want to touch on this, but you know, there’s some folks out there that have the biggest megaphone when it comes to the trauma stuff right now, and they’re pushing the psychedelic angle really, really hard.
Irene Lyon: Yeah.
Joe Martino: And the research unfortunately just doesn’t support it if you ask me. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Irene Lyon: Well, I think, I mean, I don’t want to say I stay away from that, but I guess I’m going to just say I stay away from that world. Not because I don’t think that there’s a, like you just said, a time and a place. But again, what I’ve seen is not my direct mentors, but I would call them book mentors. And I mean I can say it because I’ve heard these people talk about this stuff on big level podcasts. Gabor, Mate Bessel, Van der Kolk said it on, Rogan, said it on Modern wisdom, respectively. Yes, plant medicines and psychedelics are the way forward. We know. We’re doing the research, we have the funding. This is what it comes down to. There’s money going into this stuff at university level. And it’s an easy, it’s an easy, intervention from the, interventionists point of view, because they don’t have to. I mean. Ah. And I know in classic plant medicine you were told to prepare before and do all these things, right? How many people actually do that? Who the heck knows? But the moment you put this into a clinical setting, it loses its energetic connection to the earth, which is where this stuff came from. So not only are you, you’re losing that, but what I have seen is it’s like this is easy for people to understand because it mimics a pharmaceutical. Yeah, there, I said it. Right? It’s something you take and of course how you interact with that will determine not only if you have a good experience, a healing experience, but how it integrates after. but how many people take pharmaceuticals and like, okay, I’m gonna take my pill and I’m gonna sit and I’m gonna feel how this chemical infuses my body and goes and creates an anti inflammatory response or an antibacterial response. No one. Just doing that, you know, and, but, but it’s so easy to dispense that kind of medicine. and I’m not saying that those folks, like the mates of the world and the Van der Kolks of the world are bad people. It’s not that. But from my experience, knowing a little bit on the back end of that world, there’s still a lot of dysregulation in those people. And that’s fine. But it’s also like, this is the hot topic. And it’s an easy sell. It’s not an easy sell to tell people you, need to listen to when you have to go to the bathroom and when you’re, when you’re like, what I just said, like, that’s boring.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And yet, you know, I think that’s why that is becoming very hot news. Because it’s got, it’s got a hot ticket.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: Feel and it’s got that exotics. That exotic piece. Whereas here we are, plain North Americans, you know, where we got no culture, we got no rhythm. It’s like, so let’s. And this has nothing to do with appropriations. Nothing like that. But it’s like, this is cool. It’s kind of the same way yoga became exploded here in meditation.
So there’s something interesting, I think when you work at this biological level and you and I have talked about this is, inevitably what I’m seeing and a lot of my students and you have mentioned this. It’s like a person starts to feel human. A person starts to feel human when they get regulated in their nervous system. And that’s the strangest thing to say or to, ah, share. Because we’re human.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: It’s like what. It’s like an existential crisis internally. And I just said this on a training call yesterday, said as you start to gain more capacity and not go down the wired pathway of your behaviors which are being driven by autonomic survival stress, and you actually achieve shifting the gears and making like, free will, conscious choice. I am not going to have this reaction. I’m actually going to listen to my body and attune to it. And then when you’re on the other side and you have this experience multiple times over weeks and weeks, you literally, you literally will sit there and it’s like your Neo in the Matrix coming out. You’re like, I don’t know what’s happening. M. I’ve never experienced this before. And that the. It’s like, yep, you never have experienced this before.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: Because you’ve been living in that survival stress soup for so long. And again, what people say is, I’m not even needing that spiritual practice. Not that that’s wrong. But they say, as I get More regulated. I’m feeling more human. And I’m not going to these outside things. I’m, I’m coming within. And it’s the biggest cliche of the century because all these practices talk about we have to go within. You know, I think therefore I am. I feel therefore I am. It’s like, yeah. And how can you do that when you’re wired in this survival physiology? So it’s a real fascinating one to me to watch this unfold.
Joe Martino: Yeah. The tendency to want to escape the sort of. The confines of the physical body start to diminish because the physical body feels so sacred. And that is what, you know, from a spiritual secret point of view. I mean, you have a lot of, I mean, I mean, you know, dare I say it, sort of when I, you know, trying to say this in, in the sort of most accurate way possible. But it’s like, from what I understand, let’s just say I’m using him as an example, because he’s popular and people know him. But Dispenza’s work, when I take that, for example, and what I know of it, you start to see that as beginner’s work of this, right. You’re, you’re learning. And I don’t mean to say it in like, oh, that’s more advanced and it’s a competition. No, it’s more like you’re learning self awareness and sort of interoception, which is great. These are really important things. But when you begin to understand how to navigate stress response, how to not just run away from stress response, how to not just stay away from stress and create a reality where I have no stress response. When you start to learn that, that’s when you’re getting into the more advanced pieces of this. And what’s interesting is, at least from a lot of the circles that, that, that I’ve been connected to is, you know, that kind of work is seen as like the advanced work. Right. And I know, I look at it, I’m like, no, that’s like the beginner stuff. Right. And again, pretty basic. I don’t mean it in an offensive way as much as it’s like when you haven’t tasted something, you don’t know what it tastes like, but when you taste it, you’re like, okay, I know now I get it. And dare I say, there’s an element of what it means to be human that the vast majority of us haven’t tasted. Right. and, ah, you don’t know what you don’t know and it’s like, are we curious enough to explore? And maybe, maybe not, and that’s okay. But, yeah, that’s kind of where I think this lands for me, at least.
Irene Lyon: Recently, a student said to me, and I have some very advanced students who have got PhDs. I mean, you just met some of them when we were in retreat the other week. I’m thinking of one who has, like, a PhD in somatic psychology. And they’re trying to do all these fancy stuff with my body and the research. And I don’t know that the program, but it dismantled. It’s no more because. And I. And here she is sitting in this course, learning this blending of the things that I’ve put together, which, from what I know so far, is quite unique and hasn’t happened before. And this isn’t to pump up my ego. It’s just. This is something I stumbled across because I didn’t have everything after my exercise science. I didn’t have everything after the Feldenkrais training. I didn’t even have anything. Everything after the SE training, I needed to go into the early trauma stuff. And so she’s sitting here going, this is actually real trauma work, but it’s not one thing.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: And it never got taught to us, this mind, body, somatic psychology. It wasn’t. It never got to this base level of how we choose and how we learn and how we create new neuroplastic wirings in our system. And everybody’s talking about neuroplasticity and rewiring and all this stuff. And I use those terms too, but I don’t think anybody really knows what that means. And, again, as I mentioned, you know, I’m always listening to podcasts to just hear what’s out there in the ether. And there’s actually a really wonderful one recently again on Rogan. I’m a fan, but, I don’t know the man. He is, Sri Lankan tech, VC, capital person. And in the first 20 minutes of that talk, he actually said something really profound. And he said, we need to teach humans how to learn. Again, I was like, oh, my God, someone’s actually thinking about that, you know? And he was doing it from a perspective of seeing his kids who are young, and how this classic school system, which I think we don’t realize as much as, I see this and I think about this, but the way that many of us were raised in kind of the Prussian school system of memorize, regurgitate, be little good animals to just provide to the state like that isn’t teaching us how to use our higher brains. It’s teaching us how to be Pavlovian dogs, and be conditioned. And that works well in some situations if we need military workers and all that to, like, fight on demand. But it’s killing our ability to heal ourselves because we don’t even know how to use this higher brain for good. We just know how to program it for shifted behavior, which comes back to the food supply thing. You can give a person a list of all the things to do, as you said, when you used to work with people, you know, and they can follow it for a while, but the reason it falls off is it’s not internalized, and it’s based often on survival physiology of I have to do this and get it right, or else I will fail and my coach is going to be disappointed and I better do this, before the next session.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: It’s like if anybody’s ever done a dietary intake where you have to do your food recall for, like, a nutritionist, you instantly start eating better as you start, you know, writing down what your food is supposed to be because you want to show up and pass the test. And I know that kind of seems like a bit of a tangent, but it does connect to how we heal our nervous system, this ability to know how to learn again. And when we get that, I do think that is the human genius.
Joe Martino: Yeah.
Irene Lyon: because we still haven’t figured out how to use these higher brains for us and to teach ourselves how to heal. Some people have, but not many.
And I do think that’s kind of that next, dare I say, evolutionary piece of us is. Okay. We’ve been in the survival mode since domestication of plants and animals and control. And now we have to find a way to let go of control, be a bit more organic, get back to the earth, but also with this technology that we’ve created. I mean, it’s very Matrix Joe. If you watch the fourth Matrix movie, it’s all about machine and human finally collaborating together. And it’s about the feminine, the masculine collaborating together. That was what the thesis of that fourth movie was. And a lot of people didn’t get it. They didn’t like it.
Joe Martino: And. And I don’t.
Irene Lyon: Sorry, I kind of went off on a tangent there.
Joe Martino: I don’t want to, ah, mislead, because I know you don’t mean this, but people are going to assume that means transhumanism and.
Irene Lyon: No, no, no, no, no.
Joe Martino: Does it mean that? Yeah.
Irene Lyon: No, no, no. Yeah, no. And this is A spoiler alert. But, yeah, in the other. In the first three matrixes, they were against the machines. Right. And. And what happens in the fourth is it’s. And these machines are helping the humans with gardening and tasks and finding things. and so rather than a against or this way, that way or binary way, it’s actually an integration and a helping with what we’ve created so we can all exist in a better way. And that. That’s really, to me, that’s what I think we need to figure out, is how to have that reality. Collaboration with what we’ve created, but not to the point where it’s killing us and disconnecting us from Earth.
Joe Martino: Yeah, yeah, people have to. And I did an episode of the podcast called Technophobia. And, it’s worth. Because it touches on the need for this collaboration, this unity, because there’s a. Almost too much of a. We’re trying to overcorrect and pull away from everything, as if its bag versus our orientation to it, our own nervous system, and even the incentive structures around technology. These are the things that are. That are challenging. But, I know we went way over time here, what we intended, but that’s okay.
Irene Lyon: I’ve got five minutes before my next meeting, so I’m good.
Joe Martino: But, I mean, do you have any final words, anything to say? I think we touched on a lot of really fun stuff here, but any final thoughts before we cap it off?
Irene Lyon: M. Well, I would say that it is my wish and my intention that this, even if it’s not me, the research. Yeah, this ACE study and it’s its roots and how integral it is and important it is to chronic disease, it has to come onto the table. For some of these folks that are now, creating. We’ll see if their impact and their message creates some kind of tidal wave. It’s yet to be determined. so I have hope, but I also am often a very healthy cynic in some ways. It’s like, ah, ah, we’ll see what happens. I have to have that mindset. But it feels like we’ve waited long enough for this information to get out. Of course, the people that I work with know it like it’s the back of their hand. so it’s my wish, it’s my hope that maybe our discussion gets out to some of these folks because I consider them my cousins. Like, we’re still all part of the same family who want a healthier humanity. Earth will be fine without us. Right? It’s us. Like, we got to figure out our shit. And we got to figure out how to. How to be in ourselves so that we know how to be with others and treat others well. and if we don’t get this autonomic nervous system piece as part of the equation, it’s going to be really hard to solve for X, which is humanity being healthy again, like, it needs to be in that equation. It is an important variable. and we just. We need it, I think, to push forward and not be in another crisis in 30 years that we then have to figure out and go back to the drawing board on. Right.
Joe Martino: Yep.
Irene Lyon: So that’s how I’d like to end. That’s my wish. That’s my intention.
Joe Martino: Health emerges organically from good autonomic regulation.
Irene Lyon: Yes, sir.
Joe Martino: Bingo bango. Thanks so much.
Irene Lyon: You’re welcome. Thanks, Joe.
