Today I lean into the story of my pain recovery, a recent experience having two days of activity in a row, and then I share 3 fantastic mindbody self directed neuroplasticity skills for you to practice and integrate into your life. And my mash up of hypnosis and somatic tracking. Learning how to attend to the sensations AND create change using subconscious hypnotic visualization. Enjoy!
Here's the links for all the groups I shared in the podcast.
Power Plus Wellness - https://www.powerpluswellness.com/
Body Liberation Hiking Club NYC - https://www.instagram.com/bodyliberationhikingnyc/
Curves With Moves - https://www.instagram.com/curveswithmoves/
Baila With Kayla - https://www.instagram.com/bailawithkyla/
My YouTube has videos of my sharing these pattern interrupts for you to practice along with.
https://youtu.be/9yYgamdUblY?si=hubV8JS7v_lqDEpC
[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder, fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. more of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:57] Hello, it's Deb from the Curiosity Cure. First I want to say that I'm going to be doing some trancy kind of stuff so please do not listen to this podcast if you are driving a car or operating heavy machinery. So please just listen to it when you're at home and not doing something that requires your full attention. Thank you.
[00:01:23] Today I want to talk about blending hypnosis with somatic tracking. That's 1 of the topics. It's like hypnosis flavored somatic tracking. We're going to be violating actually, one of the rules of somatic tracking, which is we're not trying to change anything and in hypnosis flavored somatic tracking, we're actually trying to change something, but not in the way that you think you're going to do with your conscious mind, like, uh, I'm gonna make this pain go away. It's more like we're inviting in magic, wonder, creativity. We're stepping out of the frame of a fixed reality. We're going to let go. And see what emerges, we're going to invite in different ideas, concepts, sensations, awarenesses, creativity, like weirdness. We're going to talk about metaphor and how you can conceptualize what you are feeling in a different way. It's going to be about relaxing into change without urgency with the joy of curiosity. This is the part that I love because I think as a person who has ADHD, I really like novelty and I get bored easily.
[00:02:48] You may remember when I had my 1st transformative experience with pain reprocessing. Which it wasn't even called that when I had that experience, which I think is cool. I took myself for a walk and I kind of understood the concepts that the way that I had been relating to my knee pain was like fear and controlling. And a whole underground, almost like a volcano of fear, worry, catastrophizing, shame, blame, a lot of intensity around negative feelings that I was really trying to suppress.
[00:03:35] So what I did on the day that changed everything for me was I took myself for a walk and I talked to my knee and my knee talked back to me. So I would say in the realm of weird things, that's weird, like weird in the best way. In our conversation, basically with my subconscious, obviously my knee did not form a mouth and actually talk to me.
[00:04:05] But it's that inner conversation that I'm always talking about with my clients. So I was trying to tell my knee like, Hey, you're safe. And my knee was like, huh, I don't believe you. And so I got curious and I was like, okay, tell me more. And it was like, you're always trying to fix me. You're like in a rush.
[00:04:29] It was, it was basically telling me, stop, what you're doing isn't working. And I said, all right. And I just kept on the walk. I just brought in the awareness of the world around me. I was looking at things that were beautiful. I was walking slowly and gently. But, each step, I could just tell my knee, I don't need you to perform.
[00:04:58] I am inviting you to trust me. Each step that felt stable and secure, I would just be like, yeah, this is peace. This is the experience I want to have more of. And I could feel my knee relax into that sense of safety. So safety is an inside job. It's an internal experience that we can grow and cultivate, or we can connect with in one way, and then shift into, invite more of.
[00:05:37] Last night I took a dance class, and I have not taken a dance class in many years. This dance class, was in a neighborhood that I used to live in.
[00:05:51] And the first thing my brain offered to me was, you should have been coming to dance classes when you lived here, which is like 30 years ago.
[00:06:04] I had a moment of shame. I had a moment of like, yeah, I should have, and then I pulled back and I was like, okay, what is this actually saying to me?
[00:06:15] So the first thing I was saying to myself was, hey, this is really exciting that I'm going to a dance class. Like, that is so cool. And how I'm interpreting that now is I really wish I had been able to go to a dance class 30 years ago when you lived here.
[00:06:36] What's important to label and name is that 30 years ago there were no classes for bodies like mine. Or if there were, I didn't know about them.
[00:06:50] And also I didn't feel comfortable and I didn't feel confident and I didn't have a sense of self trust and I didn't trust that I wasn't going to spend the entire time comparing and despairing, my body versus other people's bodies. And so I made the right choice of not going, even if there was something for me to even go to that didn't feel shaming, that didn't reflect the experiences that I had had when I was younger. When I was told I was too fat for certain activities. I was able to pull myself back and honor that moment and be like, and I am here now and be really excited for the me who is here now and letting go of this almost like revisionist history, this perfectionist fantasy, right? And there's a little bit of diet culture in here. Like well, if I had been dancing for the last 30 years, then maybe my body would be different.
[00:08:00] Maybe, but see how that reinforces all of this belief that one, my body should be different. Two, that there was something I didn't do and it was my personal failure, of course, not the cultural failure of not having welcoming classes for people of all bodies.
[00:08:21] So I went to the class and my friend Emma was there and Nathalie back from my Re/Dress days. And also Catherine, who runs the body liberation hiking group in New York.
[00:08:34] This group is called power plus wellness and on their website, it says curating private events for plus size communities to access movement and healing free of diet culture and it was founded by Jessie Diaz Herrera and Madison Jones. Their Latina owned boutique event company curating private movement classes and immersive wellness experiences for fat folks to jiggle freely fly with silks, unlearn diet culture and joyfully exist together. It is pretty spectacular.
[00:09:15] Jessie did the warmup with us. She's got a company called Curves with Moves and she's a dance teacher and she's got a class called Free the Jiggle, which I think is amazing. So, yeah, we started doing a warm up and that was super fun. And then the next part was Baila with Kyla. Which I hope I'm saying correctly. You might have seen her on the Internet. It was really an empowerment class about movement styling. Where we got to sink in to our bodies, have her teach us some moves and really like flow with confidence in ourselves.
[00:09:58] And it was so much fun, so much fun, really supportive, lots of amazing. People in the room and had a great time and it was a workout, you know, some bending and lots of hip movements and, shoulder shimmies and shaking and jiggling. And by the time I got home, I was like, Ooh, my knees are a little tender.
[00:10:28] And what I noticed was I wasn't afraid. I wasn't concerned about it. I really had this sense of trust of like, yeah, I'm sore. I haven't gone to a dance class or a dance in years. So yeah, it's normal to be sore. I'm not worried about it. I did take some Advil. Sometimes I take some Advil, because I knew I was going to the gym in the morning and I wanted to go to the gym and I was curious. That was the thing. I didn't pre decide when I was feeling some tenderness that I wouldn't be able to do something the next day. And that's a little bit of that outcome independence quality I like to invite people into, so that we're more in the moment with our physiology. We're not feeding pain behaviors and predictive coding in terms of setting a fixed agenda.
[00:11:32] I knew that I could go to the gym, I would be able to trust myself that I wasn't pushing through anything that I was being with myself. And what ended up happening was I went up 5 pounds on my squat and that was really fun and everything flowed and felt strong and capable and that was pretty magnificent.
[00:11:58] I really attribute this to understanding pain reprocessing. The relaxed approach really helps decrease fear, decrease catastrophizing, decrease sense of that we know what's going to happen, right? If I do X, then Y will happen.
[00:12:24] It makes sense that that is how we think we should approach things that feel painful or uncomfortable because we're wanting to control it all the time, and we believe that the activity that we're doing is causing the pain. But what we know now about chronic pain is that there's multiple factors that go into why pain is sustained and that we do have the ability to at the very least decrease the intensity.
[00:13:03] I was thinking about the habit of trying to always get rid of pain before we move into movement. Some people do that by taking medication and I am not anti medication. But I think that's where we can hurt ourselves, if we reduce all the pain and we step away from using sensations in the body as information, we're missing out on building an important collaborative inner conversation. We might do that because we don't know we can have one. And that it would make a difference, a huge difference in both of our pain and in what's possible around movement.
[00:13:48] So definitely not here to say, don't take painkillers. What a fascinating way to describe that painkillers. We want to kill the pain. I want to invite you to start to practice allowing some unpleasant sensations to be welcomed in your human experience.
[00:14:07] And you get to decide. It's not a mandate. It's not a go hardcore. It's not a all or nothing. It's just this, can you be with the experiences that you're having? Even for just a moment and relate to them differently.
[00:14:27] Then practice these mind body skills as a way of interacting and specifically targeting the brain. So, learning to move more is not just a physiological experience, but a mental and emotional one as well. That is the same with pain reprocessing. And I think they pair well together, especially when you're committed to self kindness and starting where you are, not where you used to be or where you think you should be.
[00:14:57] Consistent small steps are the most useful with gentle neuroplasticity because literally we're wiring in that repetition of safety, that repetition of the safety message. Like when I took my knee for a walk, I embodied the experience of relaxing and creating an environment of safety. So I walked slowly and carefully, I paid attention, I listened, but didn't react to what was happening.
[00:15:35] And I just started seeding this idea that things are going to be different and that actually I'm safe. And as I kept walking, my knee would relax. And then I could tell because I'm paying attention and because I could sense what was happening, I could feel the relaxation and then the relaxation reinforced the idea of safety and the surefootedness reinforced the idea of safety.
[00:16:04] So see how there becomes this feedback loop between the body and the mind and the nervous system. That's what I'm talking about. You need to feel things to be able to feel the change. Also healing and growth they aren't linear, they aren't linear trajectories. One thing I have experienced both in myself and with my clients is there can be these moments of magical improvement because it's this slow build. Even after a long while of what feels like nothing is happening because our subconscious is always paying attention. And our subconscious is like faster, it's deciding faster our body's responses before our conscious mind is.
[00:16:55] So that's why it's important to think about the brain's predictive coding. Think about the order of things. And that's where we can fall into pain behaviors. The order of things is, I have to get rid of my pain before I can move. Do, do, do, do, do. And when we switch that up, we're messing with the brains predictive code, and there's other ways. And so the somatic tools I'm going to teach you at the end of this podcast are other ways of changing that predictive code.
[00:17:25] Our subconscious is always paying attention. So imperceptible changes in inner safety, attending to and tending our nervous system, our inner child, freeing ourselves from socially conditioned messages of what our body should be capable of doing and what it should look like. Those are all really powerful communicators to the self that is always listening.
[00:17:54] The first thing I want to share are two pattern interrupts, we call them self directed neuroplasticity activities, and those are great for when you're noticing fear, even this anticipatory fear of trying of doing something different.
[00:18:13] This can be really useful in helping us be able to get to that 1st step or get to home base. Because you're it's time to batter up. I don't know. That's a sports metaphor. I think that's maybe terrible. So these pattern interrupts are tapping and bilateral stimulation. They really can interrupt a spiral. And then there's 1 for breathing, I'll talk about that next. So for tapping, I do this simple EFT version emotional freedom technique. Which is what tapping is called.
[00:18:46] The simple version is when you are noticing that there is I guess the lack of curiosity, right? If there's a lot of fear, if there's a lot of. Anticipatory worry, like, you just can't. Even get to the place where you're willing. to try. This is more emotional resistance. And I don't even want to call it resistance. I don't mean resistance in a negative way.
[00:19:13] Like you are not resistant. You are responding to a whole lifetime of messages, social conditioning, learning, subconscious beliefs, all kinds of things. So you are not a resistant person, but what you're noticing is Resistance, right? Like the drag on a car, if you're driving your car and you're like, this car should be going faster.
[00:19:40] And then you realize you've just been dragging around a big branch. Or that there's so much wind, it's pushing against the car and it can't move forward that kind of resistance. Because I just always want to say whatever your nervous system is doing, it makes sense for your subconscious.
[00:19:58] It may not make sense for your conscious mind and you may not enjoy it, but it makes sense. I always just want to start there. So tapping, simple tapping. I start on the top of the head and even when I even just start to tap the top of my head, my body's like, uh, okay, that feels good. It feels good in a, like, I can relax way.
[00:20:22] So then I just tap on the top of my head and I say, I release and let this go. Then on the side of my head, I release and let this go. And then between the eyes, and if I notice that I'm like really amped up, I'll do it slowly, just kind of relax everything. I release and let this go between the eyes, underneath the eye, on the bone, I release and let this go. And on the chest, patting with my hand, almost like, you know, when you pat a baby on their back to get them to burp, I release and let this go. And then I hold my wrist, say the word peace. Take a deep breath in and exhale twice as long. You can do a few cycles of that and then just notice what's different, right?
[00:21:11] As you imagine doing the physical activity that before was triggering a lot of fear. Just imagine then after you've done two or three rounds of tapping, check back in, see how you're feeling.
[00:21:24] The next one is bilateral stimulation. I'm going to I used the cap of my water bottle. So what I love about bilateral stimulation is you take an item, hold something in your hand and move it back and forth between your left and right hand, crossing the midline of your body.
[00:21:42] The item is not important that the item crosses the midline of the body. So we're not tossing it. What is important is that your hands are crossing the midline of your body and you kind of just get into a rhythm. What I love about this is that it takes all of that concentrated neuronal energy, right?
[00:22:06] All of the intensity in your brain and it's all focused in this one region because when we're triggering the fear response, when we've got all of this energy in our limbic system, just firing off alarm bells and they're going and they're just that anticipation and fear and kind of in the past, in the future, right?
[00:22:28] So it's like, this is what happened in the past. And now I know that this is what's going to happen in the future. What this does is it's spreads all that energy around between your hemispheres. So it can't hold on to that old pattern. And so much of this work is about creating new neural pathways, new beliefs, creating new maps for our brain and body to go, especially around movement, motor patterns, right?
[00:22:58] You want to teach the brain that this activity is possible for us to do and also possible for us to do with a sense of safety. And a sense of safety. It doesn't have to be absolute safety, right? We're building the capacity for experiencing things differently. And sometimes with movement, especially if we haven't been moving for a long time, our body's going to feel stuff.
[00:23:23] But also people move all the time. They also feel stuff, right? Let's not have some kind of mythology that people who work out aren't sore. They just are not feeling negative about it. They're proud of it. They're like, hell yeah, I can't get up from the toilet without feeling that burn. They're like, I had a killer leg day, that's what they're thinking.
[00:23:49] Yeah. And so as you notice, maybe your body relaxes. Maybe you just kind of get in this little kind of trancy space cause you're just moving the thing back and forth. And if you're, and obviously you're not talking as much as I am, but you can add in a thought or a belief. You can add in I am taking the next step towards safety or, you know, I believe that my body is strong and resilient.
[00:24:17] And then you just kind of relax and now check back in. How does it feel? What are you noticing now? And these things take practice. But I find that those interrupt that spiral, interrupt that predictive coding, that kind of anticipatory experience that directs our pain behaviors.
[00:24:41] Another one that I like, that's just breathing is the physiological side and that's taking a deep breath in and then adding another breath at the top and then releasing it twice as long. Deep breath in expanding at the top and then relaxing.
[00:25:04] And that's supposed to really stimulate a shift into our parasympathetic nervous system, into our relaxation response. And that can be done anywhere at any time. And you don't want to do it, I think, too much. You just do it two, three times. And then again, check back in. How am I feeling now? What's different?
[00:25:28] Even if it's a small difference, this is part of teaching the brain That change is possible in noticing these small differences. And then we keep noticing them when they happen and keep noticing them and keep noticing them until one day you're just doing things. And Christie Uipi from the Better Mind Center has said this where, and I think I've said it on the podcast, there sometimes is a moment where you're doing things and you don't notice that you're not feeling pain.
[00:26:07] And then maybe you just get this like, oh, hey, wow, I'm doing some stuff that before either I wouldn't have done would have triggered something negative to happen. So. Keeping an open mind, being curious, having a playful approach. I think those things are all really important.
[00:26:30] It's easy to say, hey, get playful about your chronic pain. I understand it's easy to say a lot of these things, but I've been through them all. I mean, I haven't been through all kinds of pain, but I have been through each of these steps. Sometimes more than once, so I understand what it's like to want to believe something that you don't currently believe and I don't think people have to be in full belief to get the benefit of this work, but there's that bridge to willingness.
[00:27:06] I think these neuroplasticity activities can be so useful in helping you see and perceive and experience change without having to fully believe in like the whole shebang.
[00:27:21] The next one that I want to do is my take on somatic tracking where we're going to see if we can invite in something different.
[00:27:33] So I'm just going to ask you to follow along. I want to encourage you to notice a part in your body that might be bothering you. And it doesn't have to be the biggest, most painful thing. Sometimes it's great to not start with that.
[00:27:49] So just start with anything that's tapping at your awareness. I noticed some calf tension, so I'm going to use that. And just like somatic tracking, we start with awareness. What are you noticing? Just kind of sensing in, creating that witness. A curious witness coming in. And it's so interesting, as soon as I brought my attention to my calf in this curious way a part of my quad is, was like, Hey, notice me.
[00:28:23] Notice me . I was like, okay, I notice you, I was with the calf. You'll, you'll get your attention. It's interesting. So I'm noticing my calf tension. And I am seeing if it has a shape or a color and what's coming to me is a, it's a green oval, not the nicest color green, kind of a brown green, to me.
[00:28:54] That might be your favorite color. I'm just noticing it. And in somatic tracking, we would just follow along. We would just narrate and notice what we're seeing. And I, I don't want to speed through this. I think that part is incredibly important, but when we're inviting in the mystery of hypnosis. And hypnosis is not mysterious as in, like, we don't understand what's happening. There's actually a tremendous amount of scientific research about the power of hypnosis to help people shift physiological experiences. In fact, there's hypnosis that's used on people who are getting surgery as a replacement for anesthesia.
[00:29:40] So there's evidence of that. People use hypnosis at the dentist's office. People use hypnosis now getting tattoos to reduce or eliminate the pain. There's a lot of different research about hypnosis. I really love to live in this overlap between pain reprocessing and the very kind of understanding the science and using a cognitive approach and then bringing in the wonder and weirdness and fun speaking to the subconscious part of us that comes with hypnosis. I think there's room for all of it.
[00:30:20] So noticing my calf, I'm noticing, does it have a shape? Does it have a color? Does it have a texture or a temperature? I've got this kind of green brown oval that I'm noticing, and it's kind of spiky.
[00:30:40] I'm not really feeling a temperature, maybe a little bit of coolness. And then the next thing is to imagine a favorite material. Something that whenever you touch it, It feels amazing, whether that's silk, I happen to love like fuzzy textured things like those blankets that feels extra comfy, almost like you can't stop petting it when you're touching it and it feels so good.
[00:31:18] So I have that fabric in mind. And then I'm imagining a color that would feel better, and the color that would feel better is like a lemony yellow, kind of this kind of lemony yellow fuzzy fabric. And I'm imagining wrapping that part in that lemony yellow fabric, fuzzy fabric. And imagining Both the feeling of it and the color of it sinking in, changing, and just noticing what happens.
[00:32:08] What I'm noticing is there's like a little bit of a warming and a tingling feeling. And then there's a kind of watching the gray. Brown, green color change. Kind of now it's turning into a Kelly green. That green and yellow are swirling together. And I just keep imagining wrapping that material just loosely and gently around.
[00:32:45] And since my Quad wanted some attention. I'm just going to imagine wrapping my whole leg and letting that sunshiny, lemony yellow quality just sink in and feel good. And just see what I'm noticing now. And actually now I'm not noticing my calf at all. It just feels relaxed. Or it's like an absence of a feeling.
[00:33:21] And um, see you can do that. You can, if it takes a shape, like, well it had spikes, uh, which I moved into changing the color and using the fabric, but if, I could have also been like, what has to happen to those spikes for it to change? And maybe I would have imagined, um, smoothing them out, maybe with some sandpaper, or putting a balm on it, some, some kind of, even like a, if I wanted to go into the realm of imagination, I could imagine a, a magical elixir.
[00:34:08] And I would coat on it and those little scales or spikes would just fall off. And maybe then that lemony yellow quality would just be infused with this cream that I put on using my imagination. Or it could even go in the realm of like, do you see a character? What is it that you imagine? This feels like can go, like, is it a character, uh, from a book or a movie or something, you know, like, if it doesn't feel good, is it the villain or, you know, maybe even just more like it feels Like what it was oval and it was green.
[00:35:06] So I don't know. Maybe it felt like a hard plastic thing. What would have to happen for that to change? Maybe I would need to melt it. So I can imagine doing that. Okay. Do that. It's just melted. It doesn't have to be realistic. This is the important thing about hypnosis. We're talking and working in metaphor.
[00:35:33] So don't get caught up with, that's not how it would happen in the real world. Right? We can imagine, maybe you have to kiss it and then it changes color, right? We go into kind of a snow white experience. So really you can go anywhere. The idea is that you invite in something that would feel better and then imagine that.
[00:36:04] And just notice what happens. And it may or may not change exactly the way that you want it. Then we're following your subconscious. You're not demanding of your subconscious to do what you want it to do. You're having an inner conversation and you're having it through this hypnotic somatic tracking.
[00:36:31] I think I'll save the control room and the dials and I think I'll do that another time, you can create this construct of having a control room and you can. Turn things up and turn things down, but I'm going to save that. Because I want you to practice 1 thing at a time. There's not one right tool that works for everybody, but I also know that when we kind of get too much information, we want to do it all.
[00:37:02] We want to find the one that works. And it really pushes us to this idea that we have to know everything and we have to do everything to get better. To feel better. And that happened to me. I had to read every book. I had to take every class. I had to, you know, before I really, really could believe that I knew enough to feel better.
[00:37:24] And that's a very TMS kind of personality trait. Whether that's like perfectionism, also the, the, the helper in me, and then I do love to learn. So that part is also there. We contain multitudes, right? You that you don't have to know everything before you can practice. I know I shared like three things.
[00:37:55] So there was. faster EFT. There was bilateral stimulation, which is just moving something across your midline and inviting in a sense of calm, relaxation, and then revisiting whatever was feeling hard. And then there is hypnotic somatic tracking. That's what I'm going to call it until I come up with a better name for it, which is noticing the sensations.
[00:38:25] Noticing if they have a color or a temperature or a texture and moving into that curious observation state, the one that has no agenda. And then we're going to expand that curiosity beyond our conscious mind into the subconscious where we start to have a conversation, but that conversation isn't really with words.
[00:38:52] The conversation is with ideas are with that mystery, , so we're choosing a fabric that feels really amazing and then picking a color that would feel better and then imagine and when you imagine go into that imagining in whatever way feels true for you. I am moving my hand as I am imagining wrapping. My leg I am moving my hand as if I am wrapping my leg. So just let your body get into it Let yourself get into it. Even if you're like, this is weird.
[00:39:41] Hell. Yeah, it's weird. It is weird in the best way so then imagining you're wrapping it and letting that fabric, that delicious feel of the fabric and that color that would feel better. Imagine that sinking in and each time you're wrapping it, imagining that layer sinking in deeper and deeper and imagining that next layer sinking in deeper and deeper and imagine that next layer sinking in deeper and deeper and then just noticing how it feels.
[00:40:28] And giving yourself permission to just relax into the curiosity and allowing your subconscious to help you, to partner with you, because maybe your subconscious is going to be like my knee was in the beginning, which was like, Hey, I don't believe you. And I was like, okay, you don't trust me. Sure. I can understand why. So let's work on this together.
[00:40:58] Also it just might be like, yeah, I love that fabric and that color. And that's my favorite thing. And oh my God, this feels so good. Anything can happen.
[00:41:09] I encourage you to try out these exercises. If there's something that I've shared today that's been particularly helpful or you're wanting to know more, you can visit my Instagram page for this podcast and ask me a question. It helps me get better at explaining these concepts when I hear from you.
[00:41:30] And if you're looking to decrease your fear around movement, I also invite you to come to a curiosity call with me and let's have a chat about what your obstacles are. Thank you.