The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #304 -Karden Rabin 

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: This is generated by AI with 98% accuracy. However, any errors may cause unintended changes in meaning.)

Karden Rabin
Stress is simply a simple measure of what level of the survival hierarchy are you using to deal with whatever stuff or adversities in front of you. I feel, therefore I am, because my brain and my ability to think is an artifact.

It is the end result of 100 million years of being able to feel and move. Use your brain to tell your body that you're actually safe, to decondition the fear response you've developed between your symptoms and your thoughts.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein.

So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this. Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Oh my goodness, friends. I loved the book, The Secret Language of the Body. I learned so much in it about our stress response and especially how much I thought I knew about the stress response. And I just did not understand the complexities of it. I thought it was basically fight or flight or rest and digest. Nope. It's way more complicated than that. For example, did you know that the freeze and faint response are actually from the parasympathetic nervous system? Who knew? It was such an honor to connect today with one of the co-authors, Cardin Rabin. He is such an incredible, kind, motivating soul. And we touch on myriad topics, including the functional freeze response, the importance of safety, body discomfort, how to actually understand the language of your body and so much more. This is also a very personal episode. Both Cardin and I share very personal stories that we've had with sexual battery and assault and the role that that plays in our body's freeze response.

I really applaud Cardin for sharing this story. He said it was the first time he shared it publicly on a podcast. So while it's really horrible that these things happen, it can be comforting to know that regardless of your sex or gender, you're not alone and that your body's reaction can be a completely normal response to that. We talk about the role of this in the legal system and it is truly a powerful conversation. And if you would like to implement this incredible work into your life and truly make changes when it comes to your nervous system, I cannot recommend enough their heal program and you can get 50% off that is five zero. This is so, so incredible. And I am so grateful for this. Just go to melanieavalon.com slash heal program. And that link will get you 50% off their incredible program to truly take charge of, recover and optimize your nervous system.

This will help you deal with trauma and triggers and that stressed unpleasant state, it'll give you the tools and tactics you need to truly understand the secret language of your body and be at peace. The show notes for today's episode will be at melanieavalon.com slash secret language. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group, I have biohackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love, and then check out my Instagram, find the Friday announcement post.

Melanie Avalon
And again, comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right. I think that's all the things without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Cardin Rabin.

Hi friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation. I am about to have friends. This book absolutely blew my mind and I have already recommended it to so many people. I was actually actively recommending it to people while reading it. That's how you know, it's pretty, pretty powerful. So I am here with Cardin Rabin. He is the co-author along with Jennifer Mann of a book called the secret language of the body, regulate your nervous system, heal your body, free your mind. And so the backstory on this conversation, I, I could tell from, you know, reading the title and the pitch about the book, the topic, what it is about, which is the mind-body connection and how to heal yourself by understanding that. And I did not anticipate just how deep and nuanced it was going to go into this. I know we talk a lot on this show historically about things like the fight or flight response or the sympathetic and parasympathetic system. And in reading this book, I realized how binary I think I have been and superficial a little bit in my understanding of that whole world when it comes to polyvagal theory and the stress response and the mind-body connection and why we experience what we experience. And I'm sure we will dive into it today in this interview, but I am getting a clearer understanding of specifically why we act certain ways with our stress response, how that can actually manifest in not only mental health conditions, but physical health conditions. And then perhaps most importantly, the tangible practical tools you can take right now to learn the secret language of your body and actually make change there. So thank you so much, Cardin, for the incredible work that you've done. I'm, I'm so, so honored to be here with you and I have so many questions for you. So just to start it off. Thank you.

Karden Rabin
Well, thank you for what was just a wonderful and delicious intro. I feel fantastic right now.

Melanie Avalon
I got so excited, sometimes I'm reading a book and I will come across a moment of insight and I get really excited if it's something that I thought I was pretty familiar with and realized I just didn't know anything. So I'm going to ask specific questions about that, especially about the stress response.

But before we get into that, your personal story. So what led you to doing what you're doing today, writing this book? I'm also always really curious when people choose to co-author a book. So I'm really curious how you met Jennifer as well.

Karden Rabin
All right, strap in. So I joke that the field that I'm in, I was never designed to be and I'm such a such an oddball out in this space. You know, the typical path is I grew up in like suburban New Jersey, I went to an expensive liberal arts college, I was supposed to go back to New York City and be like, a lawyer or work on Wall Street. But that that didn't happen.

In college, I started getting interested in spirituality. I remember, like my first gateway drug was Allen Watts and The Power of Now, which we got published right around when I started college. And it started shifting my thinking about what I was going to do with my life, but kind of just like mildly, like I was strapped in pretty tight to, I think the conventional path that was expected of me. But my senior year, the night before Halloween, my mom unexpectedly died from long term complications of back pain and opioid abuse. And that's just sort of like the tip of the iceberg. But when she passed away, I sometimes say that core family members, particularly a mother, my mom was like the son in the solar system of my family in my life, my sisters and my dad, my stepdad, we're all like planets orbiting around this, this central figure. And when she passed, that son went out. And all of the planets in that solar system, no longer were in the orbits that they were in. And I think that during that time, for some that time of confusion and upheaval, it's always hard. For some people, it's like totally and permanently destabilizing, and they never necessarily find a new orbit. But for others, there's a new path, a new orbit available to them. And when that happened for me, this chance to not have to walk down the path that I thought was scripted for me showed up. While we were my family got invited to a so back back to I'm in college, I'm a double major in history and business. As I said, the expected path is Wall Street or going to law school, from friends invited us out to a ski home that they had in the mountains for some R&R to help the family grieve a couple months after my mom passed. They said, you know, there's this, there's this massage therapist we have. She's fantastic. You guys have all had a rough time. You should really see her. She's terrific. And so I was like, sure, you know, I'd gotten a handful of massages, and I'd really liked them. And in general, like I was that guy who would give his friends like shoulder rubs and stuff, because I had like an intuition for it, and I enjoyed doing it. And I got this, I laid down on this massage table, and I was getting this session. And while I was on the table, something happened that has never had never happened to me before and hasn't happened since. It was an epiphany moment, a voice said inside my head, and this this voice wasn't mine. It said, this is what you're supposed to do. And it was just like, in our unarguable certainty, like, this is what you're supposed to do, you're supposed to, you're supposed to do this bodywork thing, you're supposed to figure, here's this what you're supposed to do.

Karden Rabin
And it was, it was so startling. But again, it was unarguable. I agreed with it, and I got off the table.

And I went back to my family. And I said to them, just so you know, in another semester, when I graduated from my expensive liberal arts college, I'm going to go to massage therapy school.

Melanie Avalon
But how did that go over?

Karden Rabin
you know, they looked at me like I had three heads. But as I said, mama just passed away and everyone was in a difficult time and no one was telling anyone else what they should or shouldn't be doing, you know?

And so to just accelerate, I ended up going to massage therapy school, I ended up loving it, I ended up excelling at it. And so my first entry point into this world at all was just through body work. And I loved it. And for the first 10 years of that career, I studied everything from cranial sacral therapy to rolfing and structural integration, functional movement, myofascial release, zero balancing. I worshipped at the throne of what I have basically structure and function, right? If I could just get the body to be in the right quote unquote right shape, right posture, right way, that I get stuff that was tight to be loose and stuff that was weak to be strong, I get to function right, then people would be out of pain because that was my passion is getting people out of pain. But there was two things happening. One, even though I was getting better at the work and learning more and making a good living off of that and building up a reputation, some people no matter how well the structural and functional work was applied and no matter how compliant they were, they didn't get better, right? They just they just their hip pain continued their carpal tunnel pain continued their neck pain continued their iliotivial band syndrome continued or it got better for a little while and came back because of something kind of seemingly asinine like starting the lawnmower or picking something up or twisting the wrong way. And then secondarily, my own back pain, which started about a year after my mom died, was getting every time it would be okay for a while but then it would go out and every time it went out it would get worse each time it got out ago would be worse in terms of its intensity and in terms of its duration. And this was even though I was being extraordinarily compliant with everything that I taught and showed my clients, it was despite having a ab trained by Pilates and Giratonix that were that was made out of adamantium and could do anything, right? It didn't matter how strong my core was. My low back would still be bother me. Clean movement, all of this. So here I am living, working, breathing this work and having kind of a lot of success but not perfect success and then my body getting worse. And it was at this junction when I was in the worst pain of my whole life agonizing low back pain, bilateral shooting pains down both legs that felt like ice picks stabbing into my calves, unable to stay seated or standing without having to shift or do something significant to get out of pain for about every 15 minutes, walking and then just occasionally the pain being so bad falling to the ground and kind of like breathtaking pain. It was during this time that I found on a friend's bookshelf a book called Healing Back Pain by John Sardo. And some of your listeners may have heard of it. Melanie, have you heard of it?

Melanie Avalon
It rings a bell.

Karden Rabin
All right. So John Sarno was one of the early progenitors of the current mind-body movement. And this book, which is about as thick as my index finger, which when I saw it, by the way, I rolled my eyes at this book. I rolled my eyes at this book.

It's got this absurd cover of like kind of a straw, like someone, a man's back without a shirt on, kind of strong with like a towel over his neck, right? And my instant assumption was, what the hell could this book possibly have to teach me? I'm a genius fucking expert, right? Well, let's just have a nice opinion of myself at the time, still do. And I'm sure it's just going to have like some dumb exercises in it. But I had, this is TMI, but I had to go to the bathroom. So I wanted to bring something with me to read.

Melanie Avalon
This was before we had our phones.

Karden Rabin
Yeah, this was before always coming to the bathroom with your phone. So I needed that, otherwise you're reading like the ingredients on the back of the Lysol can and who wants to do that? I start reading this book and it has nothing to do with back exercises. John Sarno comes out of the gate and he, by the way, is a physician, medical doctor in New York City, asking a battery of personality questions. Are you type A? Are you a perfectionist? How much of your emotions do you feel? Do you put other people's needs before yourself? Et cetera, et cetera. It just goes on, goes on, goes on.

And this personality description, and there's a couple of them, fits like a glove and he does that. And then the second thing he does is basically in like one chapter points out how absolutely absurd, outrageous, ridiculous, inaccurate and false orthopedic explanations of pain are. That people come in, they've got, according to their MRI, the pinch is on the left side, but they feel the pain on the right side, right? You just go on and on and on that everyone's bending themselves into pretzels coming up with really smart sounding elaborate theories to make the orthopedic explanations make sense. So you've got inflammation of this, you overdid that, you twisted this, you got a bah, bah, bah, bah here. Oh, of course it's worse when you do that because of why, but it's okay when you do that because of Z. And you're like, whoa. In one chapter, he threw out 10 years of my expertise.

And I'm almost grateful that I had the expertise that I had because it made me accept it quicker. I was like, whoa, he is right. This stuff is bullshit. But this other side of things, of this basically extraordinarily stressed, constantly on an emotionally repressed personality type, this is really true. Once I started applying the basics of his method, which is to use your brain to tell your body that you're actually safe, to decondition the fear response you've developed between your symptoms and your thoughts, and to kind of reject this idea that you're broken, my symptoms improved in about a week by over 90% where they had not budged for nearly nine months at all. And having this experience, I was incapable of going back into practicing bodywork and pain, helping people with pain in the old paradigm that I had been practicing.

And that was about, not exactly pre-phones, Melanie, but that was like eight years ago now. And there's a lot more to the story about how I got to now in writing with Jen, but that was the turning point. It was having my pain resolved in a way that was completely alien, foreign and antithetical, but just completely not part of the conventional model that threw me deeply then into studying the nervous system. I became a somatic experiencing practitioner. I'll simply say that the work that helps with pain is the same work that helps with essentially hundreds of other chronic illnesses that tend to have either the label syndrome or disorder at the end of it, like chronic fatigue syndrome, carpal tunnel disorder, fibromyalgia, temporal mandibular joint disorder.

Karden Rabin
All of these things are related to dysregulation in the nervous system, usually a past history of stress, attachment injuries and trauma, and the brain strongly confusing autonomic nervous system information and repressed emotions with pain.

Melanie Avalon
You know, you're mentioning that a lot of it has to do with these chronic conditions. So how important is that word chronic?

Like is sometimes pain just pain? And when you had that, that insight, did you start thinking like literally every single sensation relates to this whole other world?

Karden Rabin
Definitely. Great.

That's a really important question because you don't want to all of a sudden become paranoid and afraid of everything you're feeling. Let's put a couple bumpers on this, right? So if we talk about what and everyone can relate to this, whether you have a medical background or not, because we're all human beings that have been through what I call the proper healing cycle, right? Proper healing cycle being you did overdo it or twist your ankle in at the gym or in the sports event, you did actually get hurt when that thing smashed into you. Or maybe you did lift too much and temporarily strain and affect some of the ligaments in your low back. That's normal. And then what's also normal, as with almost every other thing that impacts the body that isn't lethal or like amputation is that you heal usually within a few weeks. By the way, even when you fracture a vertebrae, depending on your age, the vertebrae completely heals within six months.

The body heals. So the question becomes when things, when pain becomes chronic, when pain becomes sort of random, unpredictable, inconsistent, intense, now we're starting to say, hmm, I'm past the healing period, things are getting, are either staying the same or getting worse. Now we have to lurk at how the brain and the nervous system is involved in perpetuating this pain pattern. I can also do the same thing for folks who have food sensitivities, likely for a decent part of their life, they had no food sensitivities, or they had very mild reactions. Then all of a sudden they have like, it starts to intensify like they're eating pizza, they're getting affected by, you know, by that they're feeling bloat, and then all of a sudden they're having worsening and worsening symptoms. In this situation, we have to ask ourselves, why did a previously benign stimulus like a particular food group or food substance, all of a sudden, where it wasn't before, start to seriously compromise this person's health.

And not only that, that ingesting less of it over time creates even more symptoms. So it's like before, like that bagel would mess you up. But now that you've cleaned up your diet and avoid gluten, but now when you have like a crouton by accident, you get effed up more than the bagel. Now again, we're looking at how the nervous system and the threat response system is contaminating a healing process.

Melanie Avalon
Gotcha. And does that extend to the mental health condition side of things as well?

With a food condition example, having this seemingly physical reaction to a food that gets worse over time, even though you are having less and less, like you said, what role would the experience of that in your mind play, the anxiety surrounding it?

Karden Rabin
everyone can relate to having food poisoning, yeah? Like, whether it be from Mexican food or whatever, we've all had the bad luck where whether it was the fish, the undercooked chicken, who cares, who knows, we get sick from eating, where in this case we're gonna use Mexican food.

Now, if you've gotten food poisoning and you've had that hellish 24 to 48 hours, a couple days later, if you smell a burrito, Melanie, what happens?

Melanie Avalon
well, probably going to feel either nauseous or anxious or not want it repulsed.

Karden Rabin
Right repulsed anxious nauseous in fact again let's talk about that nausea you smell it and your body is going to instantly start producing the symptoms that happened when you had the actual food poisoning right.

Melanie Avalon
It's like castor oil for me. If I even think about it, I start getting nauseous.

Karden Rabin
Right. Or if any of us had that really bad tequila night, right? And so our body actually starts our brain based on the previous experience and remembering like, by the way, food poisoning is horrible. It's dangerous.

It feels life threatening, right? So your body produces the symptoms to protect you. It also might produce mental thoughts like, Oh, my God, I got to get out of here, but an anxiety. What happens over time, though, is that because it's such an obvious dissonance, like your mind is aware that not all Mexican food is lethal. You naturally uncouple the conditioned response of the smell of burrito and wanting to die. It naturally happens. And the brain because it knows it's safe and knows it's not dangerous. You can eventually if you want eat Mexican food, maybe a couple months or a year or two later. Again, it's because you're aware that the autonomic response is inappropriate. And just that awareness, Melanie is enough to disconnect it. But all of a sudden, let's go back to gluten for a second. If this is happening with gluten, but not only are you unaware of the correlation of what led to some of like between the first acute responses and the subsequent acute responses. What if you also then go to the functional medicine doctor, the nutritionist and the you start reading about how dangerous gluten is, this is going to start your mind reinforcing an extreme fear pattern of a substance that hundreds of millions, if not billions of other people consume without a problem.

And so in our work in our program, one of the most wonderful things that slides into my DMS on Instagram, is someone telling me about how they've expanded their ability to eat again. It's wonderful. They're not going off and like effing off and eating ultra high processed foods and you know, eating garbage, but they they can enjoy sourdough bread again, where they for years weren't able to touch gluten. So what happens here is that the mind jumps on board if depending on the experience we've had in the information that follows up, and starts to make food dangerous. And most folks who start limiting their diet, it might start with gluten. But then a year later, that person's like, yeah, now the nightshades are getting me I can't really do the nightshades, right. And then we've had people come into our program that are down to three foods, like three foods. So the elimination approach from a nervous system perspective, creates fear and anxiety and hypervigilance and puts your autonomic nervous system into chronic survival state, which informs the immune system and the digestive system to react extremely poorly almost to any

Melanie Avalon
question about all of this, is every single one of these associations that's based on fear and safety learned, or are we born with any?

Karden Rabin
That's a great question that's for the geneticists and not me, but from the cursory evidence from epigenetics, we do get a lot of it handed down to us. And moreover, not only do we get certain things handed down to us, so we have like a tendency towards them.

If your parents themselves, let's say already had, besides whatever allergic tendencies they might have, if they themselves had anxiety tendencies, nervous system dysregulation, you're being kind of bathed and exposed in that from basically conception.

Melanie Avalon
Okay. Gotcha. Yeah.

And speaking of conception and just the evolution of us, I think one of the most fascinating parts of the book for me was you guys talked about evolutionarily the development of us as humans and how we in theory developed first from like a sensory type of cell and then later, you know, developed our brains and our prefrontal cortex. So the foundational part of us as humans is actually the part that's like touching the world rather than contemplating and thinking about the world, which I just found fascinating.

Karden Rabin
You're like my BFF right now, because that's like my one of my favorite pet concepts in the world, and especially in the book. And so to kind of describe that for everyone, Melanie, when you think of the original, very simple organisms, single cell organisms, they they didn't have brains, and they didn't have nervous systems, but they had cell walls. And the first place that it mattered for that single celled organism to know anything, whether something was like hot or cold, right? Is it going to get boiled alive, or is it going to freeze? Is the area it's going to toxic or not? Is there something nearby trying to eat it or not, was dependent on the cell wall, being able to perceive the world. And so the original primitive nervous systems of creatures evolved in the walls of the cells, the cell membrane. And it first just started with very simple things like hot, cold, yummy, not yummy, gonna eat me not gonna eat me. And eventually, the nervous systems that start like a jellyfish is an example of this, like it's it's a very, very, very basic nervous system net on the surface of the creature. Over time, as we evolve, though, that external nervous system built more complex networks internally, so it could communicate internally, and for example, move away from the thing that was going to eat it, or that was too hot. And then again, over many, many, many more millions of years, that those those that neuronal tissue concentrated into more sophisticated internal processing centers, which eventually became the brain. So this is to say that evolutionarily, the brain and the central nervous system derived from the peripheral from the exterior from the skin, actually, and not the other way around.

Because then you also see this, when you watch an embryo develop in a uterus, there's three primary germ layers. There's the ectoderm, the mesoderm and the endoderm. And the ectoderm is where both the skin and the brain are derived from. And what you see it's beautiful, is that the ectoderm again, which is the skin, it's the outermost layer of this developing embryo, what it does is it, it folds itself inward, like if you can imagine a sphere, and then all of a sudden it folding inwards, and coming into the middle of the sphere, like a shaft, the ectoderm comes in, creates a shaft, pinches it off, so that now there's, if you will, ectoderm in the middle of the of the sphere. And that becomes the line, it's called, I think it's called, it's not the primitive streak, the nuchal cord, that becomes the line that eventually develops into the spine and the brain. Okay, it was basically born from the skin. It's it's amazing. Last but not least, your brain needs the skin to be touched to know where your limbs and body parts are during early development. If a child is not touched, its brain can't figure out where it is. Because the skin tells the brain how to map onto the brain where things are by sending messages to it, not the other way around.

Melanie Avalon
I'm thinking about, I interviewed Jackie Higgins, she's a documentary filmmaker in the UK, and she has a lot of books as well, and she wrote one called Sentient, and it was all about our senses based on animals, like she talks about all these different animals and their senses, and she talks about, you might've heard of this case, it was a guy who didn't have, okay, so what you just mentioned with the awareness of the limbs, is that proprioception?

Karden Rabin
Yes, but this is even kind of pre-proprioception in that if someone never touches the top of your hand where your knuckles are and your brain never receives a message, your brain doesn't know where the top of your knuckles and hands are. I even mean just like physical location.

Your brain doesn't know where your knuckles are. Proprioception is knowing the position of a limb in space, similar but different.

Melanie Avalon
Okay, so yeah, because there's this one guy who had no awareness of where any of his limbs were ever.

Karden Rabin
Jeez, and what was his experience of life like?

Melanie Avalon
He, and he had to, I'm trying to remember it's, he had to, he learned to get over it by, he had to watch what he was doing. So he had to like, look at his limbs and move them. Otherwise, like, who knows?

Karden Rabin
Wow. One, it's amazing that he found a way to compensate.

That's how primary movement is, and that's why in our book we jokingly throw Descartes under the bus. I say, I don't say I think therefore I am. I say, I feel therefore I am because my brain and my ability to think is an artifact. It is the end result of 100 million years of being able to feel and move.

Melanie Avalon
I love this. And one of the other, I mean, there's so many mind-blowing tidbits in the book, not just tidbits that makes them sound trivial, mind-blowing moments in the book.

You were talking about how the amount of neurons in our brain and all the possible states we could essentially exist in based on just those numbers alone, like it was more than the atoms in the universe or something. And basically, so much of what has determined what we're, like what you just said, I feel therefore I am. So much what has determined what we're thinking and experiencing in our brain today has been completely random because we didn't intentionally choose for those situations to happen. And so it's so exciting because that means there's like billions of possibilities that we could exist in in our mind. And once we have the awareness of all of this and the tools and the techniques in the book and things like that, then we can actually intentionally move our mind to what we want to experience based on what we're touching and feeling and exposing ourselves to.

Karden Rabin
Yeah, and you know, that brings up in our in our field and a lot of folks have now probably heard these kind of these expressions bandied around of top down and bottom up work. And you need to do both.

So you know, example of top down work in the most conventional set would be like mindset work or affirmations. The really rigorous top down work is is rigorously investigating your thoughts and your beliefs and seeing how the constant cognitive narrative train going on in your skull is radically determining your experience of being alive. That's that's that would be the the heart and soul of top down work. And then by the way, that is radically impacting your somatic experience. That being said, though, your autonomic nervous system and your somatic experiences are synonymous the somatic experience, so your your ability to sense and feel the non verbal going ons of your body, the secret language of your body is the way that you tap in and interpret and start to understand what's going on in your brain, your autonomic nervous system, so that you can just truly be more aware of what's going on and what's driving things in your life. But often it is a bottom up somatic experience happening, pre verbally, unconsciously, maybe triggered by something you see visually triggered by a smell triggered by the tone of voice of your partner, your mother. And that experience in the body, then starts a cascade of reinforcing thoughts and beliefs in the head. And you get this really, really catastrophic feedback loop that keeps you stuck, bouncing between thoughts that are freaking you out and body experiences that are freaking you out and body experiences that are freaking you out, which caused your thoughts to freak out. So we're always trying to work a complete process of what's going on in the body, what's going on in the mind. Now our book is called the secret language of the body because there has been so much work on mindset and belief. But we still think there's so much more to be gained from the bottom up.

Melanie Avalon
And I mentioned this briefly in the intro, but I was so excited to learn about the specifics of the stress response. And so historically, I think I would put everything into the category of fight or flight, rest and digest. So either sympathetic or parasympathetic.

And I remember the first time I became aware that maybe it was a little bit more nuanced than that was when I fainted, getting blood drawn. And I was talking or actually getting an IV, I was talking with a doctor about it. And he was saying, well, it's because actually your, you know, your body had a response to this needle and the parasympathetic system actually jumped in and made you faint. And I was like, whoa, that's not, I was like the parasympathetic.

Karden Rabin
How could my friend the parasympathetic do that to me?

Melanie Avalon
to me. Interestingly enough, I didn't dive much deeper into it at the time. So when I was reading your book, I was like, oh, okay. Now I'm learning what's happening here.

Could you talk a little bit about the different stress responses we have? Okay, I always say them like quickly and I don't remember which ones. I feel like people use all, like a whole different collection of F words, but fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fuck, fornicate. You guys have another F word though. Okay, the F words. Could you talk a little bit about what they are and how they relate to the different states of the nervous system, especially sympathetic parasympathetic and then this whole dorsal ventral aspect.

Karden Rabin
Let's try to rock and roll here, Melanie. I'm going to provide a different framework and then map things on, all right? So this derives from Steve Porges's Polyvagal Theory and then subsequent work by folks like Deb Dana, etc. Polyvagal Theory explains this hierarchy of survival, stress. They're synonymous, whether you're using survival or stress. Stress is simply a simple measure of like what level of the survival hierarchy are you using to deal with whatever stuff or adversities in front of you. In the classic sense of the sympathetic response and sympathetic in its healthiest version is the ability to brush your teeth. It's to go for a walk. It's to do your job, Melanie. We need a sympathetic nervous system.

This kind of binary of sympathetic bad, parasympathetic good is bogus in garbage. That's also why calm is not the state of the nervous system. We want adaptability. We want responsiveness. If you thought your car was working well only when it was driving 20 miles per hour, you'd be like, this is a shit car. I want to be able to rock and roll and pass that slowpoke when I need to at 100 miles per hour. I want to be able to turn sharply if something's coming at me. But then I also want to be able to just set the cruise at 40 and listen to my music. A vehicle is working appropriately when it is responsive and adaptive. It's not working appropriately when it can't do what you need it to do. And it's also not working appropriately when it's stuck in any one mode. Same thing for a human nervous system.

Sympathetic response is, as you said, the classic fight and flight response. I want everyone to know though that this also looks like lots of things. It's not just attacking or being afraid. Overthinking is a fight response or flight response. It's part of the sympathetic side of things. If you're constantly thinking and constantly looking and constantly wondering what other people's needs are or constantly thinking about what's next or constantly worrying, that is a sympathetic response happening at the cognitive level. That's sympathetic. On the other end of the spectrum, and then we're going to kind of creep up, is what happened to you when you got your blood taken. This is the survival side of the parasympathetic nervous system because yes, the parasympathetic nervous system along with the ventral system is responsible for rest and digest. But when you reach a maximum threat state, and this is all by the perception of your brain, like it's different for all of us, like for other people, Melanie, no one cares about a needle or an IV, right? But for whatever reason, your brain saw that needle or IV as a serious threat. And for whatever reason, it said, I can't fight this needle. I can't run away from it. I can't fornicate it or fuck it away from me. I can't fawn or appease this doctor to say, no, no, no, please, no, no, no, no, please, or I'll do something else. For whatever reason, it said none of those things are going to help us survive right now.

Karden Rabin
And so it chose our most ancient survival response inherited from cold this is complete dorsal shutdown. This is possum.

This is, if I pretend to be dead, the predator won't eat me. That's not part of sympathetic. That's part of the parasympathetic dorsal vagal response. And for whatever reason, your brain decided to do that as your last level of survival. If we go up the chain a little bit, for example, oh, by the way, depression is a dorsal vagal response. Hopelessness is a dorsal vagal response. These are the cognitive repercussions of your autonomic nervous system being in a dorsal state. The inability to motivate oneself is the autonomic nervous system being in a dorsal state. And just like I said about the sympathetic, you can go from like walking to actually fighting. The dorsal state goes from literally passing out to just depression or couch potato-ness, hopelessness, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, post-viral syndromes. All of the syndromes that put people in a perpetual state of fatigue or exhaustion are derived from the nervous system being stuck in the dorsal vagal state.

Melanie Avalon
This is so fascinating. Okay, I have some thoughts and questions.

Karden Rabin
You write them down because I just want to also let everyone know because there's a third state or we want to talk about freeze

Melanie Avalon
Yes, I have an example of that too.

Karden Rabin
Yeah, most people, most people are in, especially if they're upright are usually in a form of functional freeze, which has been trending as a term lately. Freeze is when your autonomic nervous system is both in a dorsal state and a sympathetic state. And the way I want you to think about this is that it's like half your nervous system or half the wheels in your car have the brakes on. But the other half of your nervous system and the other wheels in your car are stepping on the gas. And so you have this experience of chronic tension, chronic anxiety. You're often tired, but you are pushing past it.

And you're driving your car with half your car with half your body going, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to I don't want to want to, but you're always overpowering it, or, or bypassing it. And so that's what functional freezes freezes when we have both on at the same time.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, I am enjoying this conversation so much. Okay, I'm happy you answered because when I was going through my notes, all the F's, I was thinking like with Fawn, I was like, well, where does that land?

Because that feels very like, but the way you just described it, I can see how it's like, it is sympathetic.

Karden Rabin
Yeah, fawn is sympathetic, and it's saying, okay, so I'm gonna just be really brutal here, and I'm actually gonna take you through the polyvagal hierarchy, an example of this, in sexual assault.

May I do that?

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, so actually, I could share my example because my my freeze example and I think this really speaks to a lack of understanding about this in the legal system. Because so I had a case of sexual battery and assault from a massage therapist actually appropriately enough.

It was a while ago.

Karden Rabin
Oh, I'm sorry, Melody. I'm really, really sorry.

Melanie Avalon
No, thank you. Actually, the whole experience was very enlightening. And I think a lot of good came from it because I got to go through the legal system, see what that experience was like, and also share my story with my audience. And it was, I'm grateful it happened.

And it's resolved now. But what was interesting was at the... Finally, it went to court. It took a long time. One of the things they said was, why did I not do anything? Why did I stay there? And why did I leave at the end and tip and just leave? And I was like, because I was in a freeze state. The ultimate... I didn't know what to do. I just physically felt frozen. And it was so interesting to me because the more I learned about the freeze response, I'm like, this should be something the legal system is aware of and they don't use to demonize or penalize victims or use against victims.

Karden Rabin
Yeah. So Melanie, I'm going to share something with you on this podcast that I've never shared on a public platform before. And then I still think I might walk through the the actual practicalities. So when I was a very greenhorn massage therapist in my early 20s, and like, just excited to work, right? I was at a at a retreat and I was in a sauna. And there was another guy in the sauna and we started talking and somehow came up that as massage therapists Oh my god, that's great. You know, would you come would you would you work on I've got this hip issue? And I'm like, Oh my god, sure. Like I'm excited, right? Like here's this guy, I'm getting a client sauna so cool, whatever. And he invites me to his home to give him this session. And I bring my table, I do the whole thing.

And again, in his house, like he's got a nice house, there's pictures of his family up on the table and all these other things. I had the slightest bit of spidey sense going, but I was really too young. I didn't know shit. And so I get the table set up. And I do what you usually do when you do this, you say, Okay, you know, I'm gonna leave the room, I'm gonna go wash up, you take your time, just robe, get under the sheet in the blanket, and I'll be back in a minute to do my job, right? And I come back out, instead of being under the sheet in the blanket, he's just laying there naked. And it's like, Oh, this is gross. Okay, what I should have done has been like, what the fuck is going on? I'm out. Right? But that's not what happened. Instead, what happened was this, and I can only say this in 2020 in retrospect, but this like, this like fear and social awkwardness and anxiety and not knowing what to do, like being in a threat being like, ah, right, being in a threat response, shut, like it warped my actions. And so instead of like, actually, and I like we need to be under the sheet in the blanket, I put the sheet in the blanket on him, which was already weird. And then as the session is progressing, he's making awful statements like, so have you ever wanted to give someone a session nude before, like all of this freaky shit, and I'm feeling awful and terrible, but kind of stuck in my body. And, and I complete this session somehow and somewhat like, like, there's that, by the way, you probably I think I know a lot of sexual assault victims, there's this internalized sense of shame that I've actually completed this, right? I complete the session, all of these terrible dialogues are going inside of me about how I should be out of here and what the fuck's going on. And this is, but like, I'm also afraid, like, what, what else could this guy do? And I then go to rinse up again, and I come back out. And he's hasn't gotten dressed, he's pleasuring himself on my table. Disgusting. And it was at that point, that for whatever reason, my fight response kicked on. And I said, stop what you're doing. I need to walk off my table. I need to go. Right? But still, I went through this hour long session with this disgusting individual who was demented and doing something inappropriate.

Karden Rabin
And the own and again, you go through this, this shame, the legal, I didn't go to the legal system. It's like, what the why? What's because sense doesn't make sense. Because that's not what's happening when you're under threat.

What's happening is that parts of your autonomic nervous system are taking over and determining what it thinks will be the safest outcome for you. And it's often making a poor determination. fainting when you're getting a needle isn't what's gonna isn't the most important isn't going to help you right? You and I staying in these awful situations wasn't what's been, but then the autonomic nervous system makes mistakes. So I just want to share actually, one other thing I'll say is that the other thing that gave me is I don't think men are never really in that experience. Men have no idea what it's like to actually feel that level of violation. And I think that's why there's such a lack of empathy and understanding for what the basically women go through. But it's the most disgusting, awful thing ever, right?

And so that's just an example, I can say for your audience that girl or boy, certain situations, your nervous system is autonomically making choices that make no rational sense. And then you have to try to like survive and make sense of the consequences. And if you don't understand the nervous system, and I did not 18 years ago, all I could do was shame myself.

Melanie Avalon
Thank you so much for sharing that. And I'm also so sorry you went through that.

And it really captures that experience. It's interesting because your fight did like kick in at the end. And that, I feel like that makes sense to us intuitively. Like we feel like we're, like it makes sense logically why we would have that response. And flight makes sense logically why we would have that response. And even like fawning, it's like, oh, I'm trying to like appease them. But like the freeze thing, like you said, you just don't know what's happening. So it's very confusing.

Karden Rabin
It is right. And it's because your autonomic nervous system is confused. It's just like, it doesn't know what to do. It's never been here before, right? And it's constrained by so much, so much shit.

By the consequence of that, it's like, I became much more closed off after that to potential new work, very suspicious of men. I carried a knife in my boot every time I went to do an at home session, because I was afraid, things like that. Now, I'll just take it the rest of the way, because I'm sure that unfortunately, there are people in your audience that might want to understand this even further. If someone is being sexually assaulted, and their brains making decisions. And by the way, this is very different logic for women and men, because the female nervous system and body knows, especially if it's being assaulted by a man, that it's likely to physically lose if it tries to mount a fight response, right? So it's actually making, in that sense, one could say that's the right call. If you're not trained in self defense, and you try to defend yourself, you know, being hurt, broken, cut or killed, is perceived as that that's way worse than whatever else could happen, right?

And then so we so the fight response gets neutered, if you can't actually escape, then that's not going to happen. And then why does the fawn come on? Well, that's another logical response. If, if I can pretend that I'm liking this, or if I can all of a sudden, like appease this person, then this horrible thing is going to happen to me, but maybe it'll happen without violence. That's a very intelligent thing for your autonomic nervous system to decide. And then also, if all of that gets blown through, the other experience that people experience, I mean, you get sexually assaulted have is they feel like they've left their body, they disassociate, they don't feel. And that's, that's, that's part of the that dorsal vagal response. It's that, it's that basically, I'm limp, I'm barely conscious. This gift where I can escape my body while this horrible violation happens. That's a full dorsal vagal response while being conscious. And of course, once that happens, you can't fight or resist. So like, none of this has to do with caught cognitive logic.

But once you understand the survival logic of the polyvagal system, described by Porges, then almost everything makes crystal clear sense, Melanie.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, so I can see how with mine, I went from freeze, probably to a little bit of fawn, like just get out of here and leave and tip and never come back. That was my initial game plan, because I was still confused.

But then I did immediately go to the police. And when I went to the police, that's when I just like broke down, like sobbing.

So what is that physical response then? Like the release of all of that, like crying.

Karden Rabin
I would simply say that coming out of a full-blown survival response, which includes repression, disassociation, and having to maintain function, so being in a full-blown survival response necessitates often repression, disassociation, and not feeling in order to function. That's very useful.

The moment that you feel like you've passed out of the eye of the needle when you're no longer feeling that you're in mortal danger, and in this case, you kind of like, yes, you have a nervous system that says, oh, I'm safe, I'm in the police station, right? Now the survival response starts to lower, your reconnection to your body turns back on, and the emotions of violation, horror, sadness, shame, all of those have the ability to actually be felt, but they can't be felt usually when you're in a survival pattern. That's why most people don't, it's like that you are in a cute situation, but that's why I think, Millie, how many of your high-functioning girlfriends actually don't feel but mainly think endlessly and love talk therapy but don't really do much feeling? Any of them? Some of them? Do you know those people? Boys or girls?

Melanie Avalon
I'm sure I do know girls like that, yes.

Karden Rabin
Yeah. So girls or boys that are basically constantly in a state of usually a sympathetic response, high, high, high functioning type A achievers, they're not feeling because they're actually not safe enough in their bodies and they've conditioned themselves away from feeling.

So both in the acute sense that you were in, but people in a chronic sense aren't feeling because they're in a chronic state of some kind of survival. And when you're surviving, basically other than anger and fear, feeling much isn't helpful.

Melanie Avalon
Gotcha. I so wish, I so wish it was mandatory schooling of the legal system to understand all of this because it would just really help.

Karden Rabin
No, it really should be and this goes all the way back to the early 90s like Bessel Van der Kolk was part of the the testimony of the victims guy wrote the body keeps a score. He was part of the testimony to the victims of the church sexual assault scandal.

And you know, one of the ways the defense tried to discredit all the victims was just the same way you're talking about like, why, why were these? Why don't they like, why didn't, why didn't they come forward when it happened? Why were these memories repressed? Why are they all of a sudden coming out? Why are they having the why are these children having these memories 25 years later when they're like, randomly, I don't know, getting touched or having or sex with their wives, right? What's this about? And it's because of the complexities of the way the brain and the body tries to survive horrible trauma. So like they've been fighting to make this more public for a long time and defense keeps using it to discredit victims.

Melanie Avalon
It's interesting because I get blood drawn all the time and I get IVs all the time. So when that happened, when I fainted, and then I learned that it was this, well, the parasympathetic response and everything, and this kind of ties into the cognitive side of things and the techniques and the practices, I felt a little bit more nervous and disheartened because normally, if I anticipate a threat based on my past experience, I feel like I have tools and cognitive things I can do to understand that it's actually not a threat.

What was really disconcerting to me about fainting from the needle was I was like, right up until I fainted, I felt completely normal. So I was like, this is something I have no control over. I don't even know, I don't know how to tell my body not to faint when I get an IV. How do we actually take agency and how our body interprets these threats, especially with something where it seems like you have no control over.

Karden Rabin
This is where, so if I start with just saying, everyone's entitled to a mulligan once in a while, right? Like, shit happens, the body's weird, and you add this one instance, one instance, we can chalk it up to that. And that's a reasonable explanation for something sometimes.

But the whole wonder of learning the secret language of the body is that you can start to both reexamine situations that you've been in in the past, or be aware of situations that you're in the present, or imagine situations in the future and start becoming aware of much, much subtler levels of safety and danger signal in your body. So for example, the method of listening, of awareness that we first teach people in our work, because it all begins with listening, you can't manage what you can't measure, we use an acronym called BASE, which stands for breath, actions, sensations, and emotions. And so, I mean, we could just do it right now for a moment, Melanie, let's just do this. And do you mind closing your eyes, and I'm gonna have all your listeners close their eyes unless they're driving?

Melanie Avalon
Sure, yes.

Karden Rabin
All right, so we're all just gonna close our eyes, take a deep breath, and whatever it means to you, I want you to begin to notice your body. Thank you. First, notice the quality of the breath. Is it open or closed, fast or slow, deep or shallow, free or restricted? Note that for yourself.

Actions are like behaviors or posture, they're what your body does or doesn't want to do. Does your body want to open your eyes and go on to something else? Where's your body content to sit? Does it want to distract itself? Does it want to change shape? Does it want to adjust? Is it comfortable or uncomfortable? Sensations. Is there tension? Is there pain? Is there buzzing? Is there sinking? Is there irritation? Just noticing what's present. It's like a quick Polaroid. Emotions. Are there any? Am I happy? Am I anxious? Do I feel oddly melancholy? Bored. Frustrated. I hate closing my eyes and feeling. Notice that.

Is this a little Polaroid of base? Stay with it. Notice. And now I'd like everyone to continue with 90% of their attention to pay attention with base and with 10% of your mind. I want you to think about being stuck in traffic when you really need to be somewhere. Thank you.

Yep, take another longer, you're at the wheel, dozens of cars, all the red lights, you're looking at the clock. What happens in base? What happens in your breath as you simply recollect or imagine being struck in traffic while you're late? What happens to actions? Does your body feel frozen? Does it feel like it wants to run? Does it feel like it wants to squeeze or rip or punch? And then sensations. What shifts it on sensations? Are you more tense? Is there any pain? How's your head feel? Again, imagining stuck in traffic while you're late. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, oh shit, oh shit, I gotta go, oh god damn it, gotta go.

And then emotions. What's the main emotion? Is it fear, is it irritation, is it rage, is it hopelessness? Let your imagination go. Take a deep breath, shake it off. We're here, we're now. We're gonna let go of that experience because it probably wasn't pleasant. If you want, instead, you could think of your favorite dessert or one of your pets that you love. And so I'll map that on to some other things, but Melanie, what was that like for you?

Melanie Avalon
while I was back in LA for a bit. No, on four Oh one. I've realized, I realized even consistently, even when I don't think I'm in a stress state that I tend to carry a lot of my stress physically in my body, like in my shoulders and my, like the upper part of my body in my head. And it's there even when I think I'm not stressed.

And then it's really there if I'm, you know, actually stressed, it gets heightened and intensified. I was also realizing what the whole base thing, something I've struggled with historically with this whole concept. I shouldn't qualify by saying it's super weird, but I do think it's weird. Basically ever since I, I had food poisoning, what we're talking about earlier, I had food poisoning like a decade ago, a while ago, I started getting GI issues and things like that. And I actually developed a fear of the state of my body. Like I actually got a fear of whatever I was experiencing in my body. Cause I thought it was symptoms of like being toxic or having a messed up microbiome or so sensory exercises where I'm actually supposed to just feel. And my body, all the different parts of it actually, it's way better now. Cause I've been working on it in therapy for a while, but they actually can create stress for me, even though they're supposed to do the opposite.

Karden Rabin
Yes. That's not weird at all, Melanie. That's probably one of the most common experiences of our students.

We're talking about our book, The Secret Language of the Body, but this book actually came out of the program that Jen and I lead, which is called the HEAL program. The HEAL program is a very rigorous, very comprehensive top-down bottom-up program that reshapes the survival responses driving symptomology and chronic illness in people. One of the first things that we have to deal with is that if you're trying to support someone who's been stuck in a chronic illness cycle for a while in feeling their body, usually feeling their body freaks them out because they're fucking afraid of it. I love that you're sharing that you think it's weird, but I wanted to let you know that for most folks who have had that kind of fear symptom cycle going on in their body that's 100% normal, and actually what we do first with our students is to actually get them to feel just a little bit, and then we do forms of brain retraining. We can talk about that more in a little bit, but simply to say we actually have them use a rather forceful and direct method to put their brain and nervous system in a positive state so that they make themselves feel better. They prove to themselves that they can feel different than what they're in, and then what that does is it interrupts the brain body feedback loop of fear symptoms, fear symptoms, fear symptoms. They're able to establish a beachhead of feeling okay, and then that beachhead of okayness where they're like, yes, there is a state and a way of being where I can feel not bad in my body. It's from there that we can go in and work more deeply and start not only unwinding a lot of fear in the body that's been there that hasn't been able to be touched, but it also is the place where we come from to really start experiencing joy and pleasure in the body. You get joy and pleasure because that's what it's supposed to be, and it's one of the most tragic things in the world is the capacity for stress and trauma that's not treated or interrupted to have the mind interpret the body as a place of horrors, and then for basically our self and our psyche to retreat out of our body and be stuck in our skull forever.

Melanie Avalon
Wow. Do people also experience that?

So that example was my example in some of your students where we were stuck in some sort of chronic illness or physical situation where we started harboring a fear of the body. Does it also happen for people who struggle with body image?

Karden Rabin
Yes. Yeah. So when it comes to body image, when it comes to body dysmorphia, it's a little different. They definitely, how would I put this? One of the ways the brain and the nervous system, but specifically the conscious ego, tries to create safety is through control. And control is this kind of booby prize. It's this false sense of safety and security. And so aggressive manipulation of the body can be a way that the nervous system tries to do that. But yes, in that sense, they're not afraid of their body necessarily in an illness sort of way, but they view their body as definitely something bad and that needs to be controlled. And that's a source of shame.

We could have a whole other talk about that. It could have just been a mulligan when you had the IV, right? But if we were to like go back in time and say, let's just talk about like what was going on with not right now, but it would be like if you were someone I was working with and be like, let's talk about the context. Was there anything else going on in life in that week that might have been adding to your stress or allostatic load? Was there a certain thing that was being treated that maybe hadn't been treated alone treated before we could investigate to see if there were things that weren't being tracked that might have led to that more severe you could even just been low blood sugar that would have exasperated as well. I just wanted to put in perspective that we could use the same base approach to see if the context was different that led to that more aggressive dorsal vagal response.

Melanie Avalon
Well, it actually came to me in a moment with what you just said. I think I know what it is. And I think it does relate to the story aspect of things. And it's that I hadn't fainted from a needle in probably like a decade when that happened, the first time that I ever fainted was from drawing blood. And I had drawn blood a lot. That was the first time I fainted with completely, like I wasn't nervous or anything, and I fainted and that really freaked me out. And then I got really scared of fainting after that. Every time I would get blood drawn, I was so nervous. I had this story in my head now, even though the data showed that the majority of the times I had not fainted, I just remembered that one time it took me a while to perceive that feel like I had gotten over that story.

I was telling myself about fainting. And then when it happened again, I remember now, like right before I fainted, she was kind of like struggling to like find the vein or like get it. And so I think I started, I started telling myself the story of having fainted before, I think that's why it happened. And then I was like, oh man, 10 years of not fainting and now I got to start over with like my mental like story I'm telling myself here about fainting. So, but yeah, so speaking of, well speaking of like, so like making change there and retraining and so listeners in the book, I want to express the listeners that there are so, it goes very specifically into a program that you follow and these techniques you use in the moment, kind of similar to what we just did with the, with the base exercise, these techniques that you use to actually interpret what's happening in your body and switch and change and translate and all these things, as far as actually making change, especially because when I read your book, I was like, oh, there's so many tools here and so many things. And like there's exercises like identifying your attachment style and how it, like how it manifests in your stress response and where do people start? Because there's so much. And you say at the beginning of the book, I think that you don't have to go in a certain, or you mentioned like how to apply the book and the order you can go in and how to implement things. So yeah, how do people start?

Karden Rabin
The best way to start is to, in the most simple fashion, follow what we call the AIR approach, A-I-R. And AIR is short for Awareness, Interruption, and Redesign. And it really is, in a nutshell, the application of the science of habit change to your autonomic nervous system and to your survival response. And so in this sense, the awareness that you need to develop, first and foremost, is what we just did to become aware through noticing body signals, am I in a state of stress or not? You said it yourself, Melanie, like, I'm holding stress in my body, I think, all the time. By the way, because it's all there all the time, you don't even notice it unless it's more acute, right? So that which we're not becoming aware of or noticing, that habit's just gonna run and run and run and run and run. So awareness is the first step.

You must have a sense of something. It's like, whoa, every single time I have to do a presentation at work, I get X, Y, and Z symptoms. I notice this about my heart rate. Like, now we have some data, some stuff that we could work with. Next, and this is where it's helpful to know a little bit about the survival response with the polyvagal theory, it's like, whoa, am I having a really sympathetic response? Like, yes, this is very anxious, it's very overthinking. I feel like I wanna run for my life, right? That was like, oh, if you know where you're at, I'm in a more sympathetic state, then the book has very clear support for you. By the way, for all your listeners to know this, if you're in a sympathetic state, trying to calm down is dumb and won't work, and it's like trying to find a BB gun at a freight train. So stop trying that and forgive yourself if you've been frustrated for why deep breathing hasn't been able to calm you down when you're freaking out. And the reason is is that when you're in a sympathetic response, folks, the animal of your body, what it got to do for 100 million years, was do something. Punch, run, yell, hide, scream. It did something physical. So if you're in a sympathetic response, and we show this in the book with things like stomping, wall presses, there's a bunch of techniques, you need to give yourself a little bit of time, one, two, three, five minutes, to actually support your nervous system discharging that energy. And it doesn't mean by running away or punching the person you're mad at in the face, it's by doing physical exercises that allow that sympathetic charge to start to come down. That's where things like box breathing, physiological sigh, voo breath, other things that are informed by polyvagal, or even yoga or your traditional meditation practice, like you do you, whatever you like, you will be able to occupy a more calm, or what we call ventral vagal state, an embodied and present state, if you discharge that sympathetic first, all right?

And now what we've done is we've combined awareness into interruption, we become aware of state, we're interrupting it with technique, and this is the beginning of true autonomic nervous system change.

Karden Rabin
And when you, and remember your neuroplastic, when you start creating a new habit of noticing your dysregulation when it arises, and instead of like checking out, repressing it, disassociating, pushing forward, hiding or eating, or doing an addiction, drinking or fucking, when you start noticing the dysregulation, and when you get out of that cycle of cognition, like, oh, why am I doing this? Or shame, shame, shame, or it's because they did, when you are smart enough to get out of the endless, useless thought tennis, and just be like, nope, the animal of my autonomic nervous system is in a threat state, it's deploying sympathetic, let me discharge this, and regulate, oh man, are you teaching your brain new tricks, and you're teaching your body new tricks.

Then lastly, that whole process, you've already been doing step three from the beginning, which is to redesign. The practice of being aware instead of just reacting is changing your nervous system, you're redesigning your patterns. The practice of doing an interruption technique to then bring yourself back into your window of tolerance, back into regulation, back into presence, back into feeling is part of the redesign. And then the last thing is redesign is also elements of working with thoughts and perception, like Melanie, for you, like let's say you had a scary, a sensation in your body that created some fear. Well then you might do a little discharge, do some ventral, get back to, do some ventral techniques, get back to regulated, and then at the end, you might put your hand on your heart, you might really be with your body and mind, and say, our body is not broken. Our body is safe. We fucking love our body. And I'm no longer going to be afraid of it. And then you let through base, how does your body feel? How does your brain and body feel when you really start to marinate into those affirmations? So that's also part of redesign.

You're changing fundamentally the relationship to your body. But you have to be in a regulated state to learn things and do stuff new because otherwise you're just going to be in the activated state. So that's an example of how to start. Maybe that still sounded like too much, but I'll also say this. I know we're on a biohacking podcast, but there are no shortcuts, y'all. Really to like deep work, like this is work, right? It's biohacking work. And so that's an example of where we start with the air framework. I'll pause there.

Melanie Avalon
I love it. And listeners, it's all in the book. So definitely get it.

I have one last random nuance question about all of this. There are so many different techniques in the book to employ. And even with each leg or arm or appendage of the different techniques, there's multiple options like practice one, practice two, practice three. Something I'm really intrigued by is why certain ones work better for certain people. And you mentioned like the breath work, for example, and like the physiological side. And like that one works so well for me. I know you say in the book that people can have their favorites that they can implement. And if you're ever in a moment where, you know, cognitively, you don't know how to map it to which specific state of the system and what to employ, like just do the thing that helps you in that moment, essentially. Do you have a theory or an idea of the inception of why certain techniques work for different people? Is it happenstance, chance, like all the different breath works is for me, would it be that I try the physiological side? And at that moment, the first time I tried it, it happened to really work for XYZ reason. And so now I associate it with working for me. And now it's becoming my favorite. So basically, the two questions are, do certain techniques work independently better for certain people? Or is it a little bit of happenstance, chance at the beginning of what we identify as working for us? And then when things do work for us, do they start working better the more we do them? Because of the, you know, familiarity approach or theory? That was a big question for the end of the show. But

Karden Rabin
For example, breath work has always been extremely challenging and a difficult place to enter regulation from, which has also been shaming for me because it's the most popular entry point for almost everybody, whether you do yoga and meditation. Being challenged by bad or disliking breath work always made me feel like what the fuck's wrong with me.

But I was a terrible childhood asthmatic who was hospitalized like nine times. Right? So first is you really got to think about your, especially for the things that don't work, you want to think about like, what's my personal history? And also does this go against what, how I habitually protect myself? So for example, we'll be like, I don't like feeling. Well, that's probably because you don't like feeling. All right. And because there's a bunch of shit down there and part of your defense mechanisms has been not feeling for a long time, or because you have body issues that need that need love and attention. And I wouldn't start there, because that's really hard. But it's like, wow, for that person, the breath has really been my access point. So one is personal history. The second thing is the reason why we say start where it works is because we want you to start somewhere, but have no doubt that eventually you want to explore all the things like now that I've regulated enough and built a lot of skills working through my breath work barriers have been a really important next level of personal inquiry insight and regulation.

So even the places where we have challenge, what so once we've used the skills that work easy for us, again, to build up that beachhead of regulation that beachhead of being in our body that beachhead of capacity, we can then use that to bridge ourselves into other ones that might be difficult for us, but could really be fruitful for us. But I think if you just stay in your comfort zone of the regulation techniques that work, you are that's gonna you're gonna hit a glass ceiling, you're gonna hit a plateau. Okay, yeah. And I think the last thing that's really important, and especially why our book has the third part, which really talks about your childhood about your attachment styles and about development is that dysregulation in the presence dysregulation in the present. Always has a direct through line in relationship to the past, because your brain is a habit, a pattern recognition and habit repetition machine, it is rarely doing something new, unless the situation you're in is entirely novel and new, and it has no reference point. So in which case, if you're just trying to use breath work or the physiological side or polybagal techniques or discharge to continuously try to regulate yourself in the present, without really diving into the inquiry of your heart and soul and your past, you're not working with the roots. And I believe just in the same it's important to work with top down and bottom up. It's important to work with present and past.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Well, I think listeners can now see why I am so appreciative and grateful and fascinated by your book and your work.

And so friends, get it now. It's called The Secret Language of the Body. Regulate your nervous system, heal your body, free your mind. The last question, it's super short, but it's what I ask every single guest on this show. And it's just because I realize more and more each day how important mindset and gratitude is. So what is something that you're grateful for?

Karden Rabin
I am grateful that my two beautiful daughters are brilliant and healthy.

Melanie Avalon
I love that. Well, thank you so much, Cardin. This was absolutely incredible. This was one of the most visceral, which is appropriate, experiential interviews I've had.

This was absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for everything you shared and your vulnerability with your story. And I'm just so grateful for your work. I think it can help so many people. Any links, how can people best follow your work? Can they do your heal program? All of that.

Karden Rabin
Well, first of all, thank you, Melanie. And thank you for going deep with me. That means a lot.

The wonderful free playground of Instagram. I'm at Cardin Rabin. Jen, my co-author and co-founder is I Am Jen Mann. And then our platform is called Sumia International. And so it's at Sumia International on Instagram. SumiaInternational.com is also our website. And it's like in our LinkedIn bios and on our website, there's ways to do the first module of the program for free so you get your feet wet with what real, amazing nervous system regulation can be all about. Yeah, I think I think those are the best places to check us out. And of course, the book on Audible or wherever books are sold.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. And which, by the way, if listeners enjoyed listening to your voice, which I'm sure they will, you narrate the audio book and part. That's true. So, well, thank you so much, Cardin. This was incredible. We'll put links to everything in the show notes. I wish you the best. I look forward to all your future work and have a beautiful rest of your day.

Thank you. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon Biohacking podcast. For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What, When, Why, as well as my supplement line, Avalon X. Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guests. And always feel free to contact me at contact at melanieavalon.com. And always remember, you got this.