Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: What'S worthwhile healing Mind, Body and spirit I'm Ramsey Zimmerman. I choose peace of mind, vitality of body and joy of spirit over stress, exhaustion or overwhelm. Together, let's explore and pursue the many ways to build holistic health and wellness.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: With the sort of the universality of these smart devices and the social media. And I think we are being trained out of our resilience. There is a signal coming from our system, mostly unconsciously, as we saw, mostly unconsciously, that is there to provide us the help that we need in the moment.
I'm really hopeful that people are finding a new way of healing and recognizing that it can be much gentler than we've previously thought.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Hey there, it's Ramsey here. That was Stephen Hoskinson.
Steve is the founder of Organic Intelligence and is a long time somatic therapist that has gone a somewhat different path.
As I understand it, somatic therapy aims to help people heal from trauma by looking at the physical sensations experienced by and stored in the body. But instead of focusing on the negative sensations and experiences, Organic intelligence looks for positive signals that the body uses to heal itself. We also spoke a lot about orientation, which is deliberately looking around and collecting inputs from our actual physical environment.
Steve explained that orientation is a type of mindfulness and our brains can focus in on and use cues from our environment for our benefit if we give it the opportunity. Steve described how our brains are predictive and how our brains constantly operate based on expectations, either from real data that we perceive or based on preconceived notions which may or may not be accurate or relevant. Maybe it all boils down to this. We can benefit from paying attention to the world around us and keying in on the good as we move forward.
I thought this was a challenging but fabulous conversation. See what you think.
Hey Steve, how's it going?
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Great to see you. I'm really excited about this conversation. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely, I'm excited.
And you and I, we just met earlier today and now we're, we're back for round two, doing it for real this time.
And I learned that you are a long time therapist and you're the founder of the company Organic Intelligence.
I'd love to start there. What is Organic Intelligence? And I know it's the name of your company, but what do you mean by the phrase first of all?
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Yeah, well the phrase really looks at all the dimensions of what we do as an organization and so we are providing organic intelligence training. So we train coaches, we provide resilience training for individuals and we are also a community, really a global community of over 100 different countries represented among our membership. And we're really looking at the ways of healing that are innate. That is, rather than thinking that we have a better idea than Mother Nature about how we're supposed to heal, we're really leaning into and discovering the ways that innate and natural healing will emerge for all of us given the right conditions. And we have an idea about what those conditions are and provide a lot of support for people to find it for themselves.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Good, good. Well, let's, we'll, we'll get more into a lot of those details later. But first let's do, let's talk a bit about your background.
You were explaining to me that you went through clinical psychology schooling and you quickly ran off to join the somatic circ.
What was that all about?
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Oh, you know, I had gotten through all of my coursework and I was walking through the main office and I saw this flyer that said healing trauma through the body.
And I was like, oh yeah, that's what they didn't mention in psych school, the body. You know, there's a little bit about somatization, a little bit about psychopharmacology, but really not about the body. So I began to study intensively. I felt like there was this missing link between the mind and emotion work that we're doing in therapy and the body that carried people in. And so we began to work in those realms of the somatic areas and also really in also eastern understandings of mind, body medicine and for instance did aikido for many years to really have this in depth understanding, this embodied understanding of how the body works and how it heals. And so I began to train and then I trained in somatic experiencing for 17 years. I was one of the most prolific trainers in se and that was a somatic based approach to trauma. And that's where then things began to get interesting because I began to experiment with different ways of working. Rather than just feeling the body all the time and feeling the sensations associated with past traumas in a titrated way, I began to really question that kind of approach.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: And what is it that you were questioning? Like why, what were there limitations that you're running up against or what was the issue?
[00:06:01] Speaker A: I think the issue was that I had, coming out of psych school, it was a revelation to me that sensation awareness could have a really powerful effect.
But it was in fact I so powerful that it would overpower people sometimes. So sometimes you would get a really powerful transformation and Other times, people would just be overpowered and they would.
They would not be as well after a session as before. And so I became really interested in why that was and what's the difference. What makes the difference between a healing session that is really integrative and one that might be disintegrative. And became really involved in the stabilizing of people's well being prior to trying to do trauma work. And then I found out by stabilizing, the trauma work became something else entirely. People began to talk about other topics. And I began to see that the topics they were talking about were like trauma analogs. So there's a session that we look at in our course in which a person who was in the Loma Prieta earthquake, really in our backyard here, was talking about being at home. And in Pleasanton, we talked about she was a striker on the soccer team, you know, on Sunday games.
And she said, and then we'd be home with my kids. And then.
And then the train tracks were right out there. And I was on the phone, I go, okay, wait a minute, the train's going by. And she's like, the whole house would shake. And what I realized were all of those elements were parts of the. The trauma memory, if you will, or what I called the trauma memory at that time, but in a completely positive valence, because she had talked about the kids, she talked about being in Pleasanton when the earthquake happened, and then the whole house shook.
And in other words, she gave us a right side up image of how to heal, how to heal, how the biology wants to heal. Whereas in previous trauma work it was upside down. Oh, we'd be approaching, oh, you know, what happened when the earthquake happened? What are the sensations associated with that? And trying to get that discharge. And so now I think that the work that I did prior was upside down. And we're trying to communicate to the therapeutic community and to people that are struggling that it doesn't have to be like that. It doesn't have to be the rehearsal of what's wrong, but that your biology, given a chance, will heal through a different and more.
More positive way, for lack of a better term.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: If you were finding that sometimes sort of traditional somatic therapy was effective and sometimes it was counterproductive, were you able to sort of isolate when it was more likely to be counterproductive? Like, are there certain circumstances or commonalities or, you know, ways to sort of zoom in on that limitation to see where a different approach might be warranted?
[00:09:34] Speaker A: Thank you so much for that question. That's, that's brilliant.
I think so. I think what we discovered was a way of seeing the human, our human organism in how resilient it is. And that is basically measured by how much intensity that biology can natively or organically process easily.
So, for instance, you know this idea about thresholds, which is, you know, when, if you're a parent, for instance, and the kiddos have been loud all day, it's toward the end of the day and you're like, you're getting on my last nerve. Kiddos, you know, reach the limit, that limit can change. And if it's starting at a low limit, it doesn't take much to tip the system over. And so that's what we have determined is how to recognize those systems that tip over easily and then how to then treat those easy tip over systems and how to treat those that are, you know, that have a bigger bandwidth, basically.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Okay, so what's sort of the, what's, what is fundamentally different about your approach? What makes your approach fundamentally different?
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Well, it's that one in particular that we're watching absolutely for, the notion of these thresholds, of what is the bandwidth. And then we're using a framework from complexity science that really sees and helps the practitioner map where that person is on their bandwidth journey. And we figured out how the bandwidth increases, and we figured out that largely negative intensity is what can decrease it. So those sessions that were powerful but disintegrative just meant that people were pushed over their threshold of what the system could tolerate. And so we are working first and foremost to figure out what that level of tolerance is and making sure that we work within that and that we are working in positive valence. And this is what's really revolutionary. One is that we're not talking trauma. We are having a normal, everyday conversation with people, a free association conversation. For those of psychodynamic therapists out there, we're doing a free association conversation in which the person is just talking about whatever comes to mind.
And within that, we get to see the native system. We get to see who's really there, not the person who's afraid that the therapist is going to call them out on some unconscious conflict with their mother or call them out on their misbehavior, but really just having this free and accepting conversation and watching, watching for the physiology. And then in the physiology, we'll be producing the signs and messages of positive support that are being missed. Because counselors have generally said you have to look at your problems square in the face. You have to excavate the issue, you have to go back to your challenges. You have to look at your attachment issues.
So instead of looking at all those things, we are watching for the signals coming from that system that, that are actually meant to bring support and growth of bandwidth. And that's.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: So what kind of.
So what kind of signals? Like what? Can you give me some examples? What, what do the signals look like? What are they?
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Oh, thank you. Yes, indeed. So we have a. We have many channels that we experience life in. And so there we, we see images in our mind.
We. We have sensations of the body.
We're. We're cognitive. So there is, there's the meaning ch.
And then there are feelings, affects, and so that framework we call isoma, the ISOMA framework. And mostly what's coming through those channels is what's wrong? Oh, I shouldn't have said that. Or I'm worried about what's going to happen, or I'm scared this next thing is going to happen, or I feel a lot of tension. All of those channels are pretty crowded with messages from the negativity bias. What's wrong now?
Instead, there is the possibility of recognizing how always in those channels is coming a more supportive message in each of those channels. So you might be talking with somebody and then an image comes up like, oh, yeah, I just saw the moment my child was born. Or I was just thinking of a rose the other day that was walking along a path and there are these amazing roses and bees there.
Or that might be a sensation. Like right now I'm putting my hand to the side of my cheek and these come unconsciously. And then this is another message that is maybe the hand unconsciously on the side of the cheek, or the forefinger stroking the thumb, or there's a rocking back and forth that's happening all of these kinds of things in all of those channels in sensation and cognition and also in orientation, you know, the attention out into the environment and the emotions, somewhere in those ISOMA channels will becoming a message of support. And they've just been missed because we've been told they're not relevant. They are the most relevant things of all.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: So do you imply that there, there must be a message of support? Because of course there is. Like there's good and bad and, you know, there's supportive things and there's negative things. And so you're actively just looking for the supportive signals. Is that kind of what you're describing?
[00:15:38] Speaker A: It is. And there's a pretty good science behind it, which is the science of self Organizing systems that says under the right conditions, certain systems will be self organizing. So these are the signals of self organization. When they're actually experienced by the person whose system they're coming from, they begin to create organization.
Not just like relaxation or not like just less intensity, but the ability to flow and modulate and be in the ups and downs of life altogether. And that's, that's kind of the, the secret sauce.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Okay. And you mentioned earlier that that systems or that people and their systems, you know, tend to have to be self healing.
And so those are connected, right? The, the positive signals and the self healing. Talk more about that connection and how those reinforce each other.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: You betcha.
It's true that most of the early signals around the self organizing system, most of those signals actually are hedonically pleasurable. So there is hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic is stuff that feels good, is pleasurable, and the eudaimonic is what is meaningful.
And mostly, you know, like in a lot of circles, eudaimonic is really exalted, like, oh, let's get into what's meaningful, build your purpose, orient around purpose, and so on. But to build the capacity to experience positive intensity, we have to start small at the simple pleasures.
The simple pleasures of the hands forming automatically a prayer position, or the feeling of just gently rocking back and forth, or the, the image of grandma, you know, in her hands. Right. There are simple pleasures that come through that when they are contained and reflected by say an OI coach that then at the right time, really catalyze the ability of the system to have greater and greater bandwidth, to be able to experience greater intensity without challenge, with ease and even enjoyment.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: Okay, so what I'm hearing you say is that in therapy for folks that have experienced trauma, you don't focus on going through the details of the trauma. Instead you're looking for and searching out positive reinforcing signals that can be used to sort of build on the person's innate self healing mechanisms.
And you also mentioned very briefly orientation.
What is orientation and how does that play into this as well?
[00:18:39] Speaker A: Yep. Two things I would say about that. One is because we're using primarily the attunement model and free association conversation.
Anything that any topic that a person comes in with is what we work with.
So if a person comes in and they want to address trauma or if they want to talk about their past, we're down. We're just right with them.
Over time, eventually people recognize that that's not necessary and that it's not Even healing necessarily, although being heard can feel really good.
So the difference is people start to do and learn. The initial conditions and the initial conditions that create the, the system that is self organizing begins with that first step of orientation.
And orientation as you're checking in on is connecting to the environment through the senses and the way I've been defining it.
So by getting the attention outside, then the system begins to tether itself into reality in the inside world. Then we are vulnerable to that negativity bias. And then, you know, we're ruminating, we're having negative thoughts, we're you know, anticipating stuff that's not so nice or whatever.
So we, we do something different and we recognize that what, what neuroscience is telling us all about right now, which is the brain, isn't really the reactive brain and trying to keep us safe from the saber toothed tiger. Primarily the brain is the predicting brain.
The brain is predicting what's coming from the environment and making little micro adjustments to get us ready. So if it is, you know, if it's really cold outside and we look out and we look see the temperature and we see the snow on the ground, then automatically, without trying, without even being aware of it, the system, the brain will begin to marshal its resources to do like, like shovel some coal in the, in the stove. It'll begin to pump up the intensity a little bit, maybe get some pre goosebumps going. In other words, it's getting us ready for what's coming. And so that getting ready is a real key. And orientation is the bridge between the inside world and the outside information that the brain needs to, to get us ready for what's coming.
So by connecting to the environment through the senses, the brain gets us ready.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: So talking about the brain predicting.
So the brain is basically making its best estimation of what's going to happen, right?
And I suppose the brain could do that based on any number of things. It can base it on perhaps its previous experience, but. Or it could base it on its bias, or it could base it on what's happening that it sees in the environment.
Or you can get a startle or a jump scare, you hear a sound or you see something flit by the side of your eyes.
So are you basically saying that this startle mechanism or the fight or flight response or any of those things could be the brain sort of predicting what's going to happen and sort of getting yourself ready for the body's response? Is that what I'm sort of hearing you say?
[00:22:18] Speaker A: In a way? Because the brain, the system creates These models of expectation, we know from attachment theory and ACEs studies that the early life experience shapes the brain to expect certain environments.
So you grow up in a family, and that shapes the brain is shaped to fit into that family, which usually has in our ancestral past worked pretty well because, you know, we were in a tribe, we were in, you know, hunter gatherers. And, and so that was, that was pretty apt. Today, family may not really get us ready for what's out in the world. And, and many times that model doesn't work fit. And so the brain, the system, is checking, like, okay, what's, what's expected.
And then they look out into the world and then they see a violent, alcoholic, unstable world.
And in psychology we call that projection, but that can be the expectation. And so the expectation, that model can be changed over time, but it really takes a different input. And so orientation gives the opportunity for that different input. Rather than being prepared for what was in the past, which might call for fight or flight or freeze, then instead it gets to be connected simply to the material reality around in which no fight or flight or freeze is needed or necessary because all of those are super expensive.
Fight and flight and freeze are super expensive.
So the brain's predicting ability is also tied to the use of energy in the system.
This is from a framework called allostasis. That is, the brain is also managing the energy budget.
And so the more accurate the prediction is, the less energy is wasted. Getting ready for something that's not even coming right, Getting ready for the past instead, we want to get ready for the future.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Wow, I'm so glad you mentioned expectations. I'm really glad that you framed it that way. I've always, I've thought for a long time that, you know, people are either upset or not upset often based on whether their expectations are met. Like, if you, if you have a, if you have an expectation of, of like a minimum or something that you expect and it's a, it's a good thing and it doesn't happen that often is the reason to be disappointed or upset.
And also, you know, or you get, or I get really stressed out when my expectations are not met. When something completely unexpected happens that I didn't, that was something, you know, not in line with my expectations. So it sounds like you're, you're saying that that is not just sort of a personality, emotional kind of thing that, that just runs really deep all the way to what the neuroscience level.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Oh, and, and to our earliest formation, to our earliest brain imprints. Our brain gets shaped to expect A certain environment. And this is. This is what the attachment literature, of course, shows. This is. This is why, like the ACEs study that shows, you know, adv. Childhood experiences then shape the brain in specific ways. And so to counter or create a different expectation set, then orientation is one of the basic keys.
And then positive affect is another aspect of something different. And Ramsey, the wild thing is also that we're shaped. Our brain is shaped to expect that. And so there is the notion in psychology of projection like, oh, I'm expecting them to not like me or expecting them to look down on me or something.
And amazingly it happens.
That is the expectation. We are unconsciously signaling into the environment for that environment to give us our expectations.
So it's not just a projection like, oh, I'm imagining something. We are actively shaping the environment to give us what we expect.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: And because we're behaving as if that is happening. And so then it starts happening because we are behaving as if it should be happening, especially with a person. Like, if you expect a person to be rude to you or to dismiss you, you're probably going to be rude or dismissive or hostile right back. But it's actually preemptively. If they weren't actually feeling that, but you were expecting them to, but then you do, right? Yikes.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: Yikes.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: How can we break that then? So how do you use things like orientation and other things to essentially reset people's or their brain's expectations?
[00:27:49] Speaker A: That's. I think you just. I think you just said it. I think we use orientation to reset expectations.
That's awesome.
We could also do like 25 seconds of orientation. Your listeners could have a short experience if you like. We could do some of that and see what people think.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Why don't you walk us through that?
What's that like?
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah. So first thing that we have to get used to is not doing very much.
And so we're all the time trying to control things, you know, get our environment to be like we expected or like we want it. We're going to let go of all of that. Nothing we have to do now except just let the eyes free to go where they want to. Let the eyes explore around in the space where you are right now and just see what you see when you see what you see.
And just in the seeing channel, there'll be thoughts that come, of course, and then come back to the seeing channel.
Just letting the eyes tour around the space that you're in and just let them see what they like to see for A moment. Just a little break.
A little tour of the world around.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: Keep your eyes on the road if you're driving.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: Thank you.
That's especially a good idea. So then most of the time, people have, I don't know, a different feeling about themselves. They often feel a little bit more relaxed or something. I don't know if you. If you had any of that, but. But, yeah.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I was. I was noticing the. The things here in my room and, you know, the light coming in through the window and the little bit of.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Clutter on my desk over on that. That thing over on your left. What. What are you seeing over there? On the left? Yeah, there on your. On your left.
[00:29:47] Speaker B: On my left?
[00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was.
Yep.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Right there.
[00:29:52] Speaker A: Yep. Right there.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: It's a little there.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: Barrier that I have set up on my desk.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: What is it? What kind of barrier?
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Well, it's like a.
It's kind of brown and textured. It's sort of like a. It's like a divider so that I can divide my desk from the rest of the bedroom.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Right. Creates this. This space for you, in other words.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: And so that when I'm walking around in the bedroom, I don't have to see, like, all of my workstation.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: So that I have a little bit of separation.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: How awesome is that? Like your own sort of personal psychic boundary there? And. And the reason, Ramsey, I'm bringing it is because in the.
Just freestyle exploration with the eyes, your eyes picked that out. There was some place that caught your eyes. And that's a classic example of how your psyche is bringing a supportive message.
That's a classic example right there. It's bringing boundary, bringing you your own space and taking care of you in that way.
How cool is that?
Right?
Right.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: That is cool.
I'd like to shift the conversation just a little bit. I think we've done a pretty good job of sort of describing this approach.
And I know that you've been at this for a while.
You know, you. You have a lot of experience.
And I often like to ask people how they think that things now are different from how they were five years ago, 10 years ago, or going back 20 years. Like, what's your sense of why and how things are different now? And I imagine that would play into, you know, how people are experiencing, you know, the world around them or not experiencing or actively not experiencing the world around them, you know, is orientation and, you know, how connected we are to the world around us. Is that fundamentally different now than it used to be?
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. And there's been a whole, I've been a part of a whole progression of the transition in, in therap from a more psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, Freudian approach that was dominant and then to a place where there was this experimentation and the realization that body awareness, for instance, plays a big role in the experience of oneself and what's called interoception, the experience of one's internal state.
And so I was part of that wave of working in the somatic field and helping people contact their physical sensations as a way of being more in touch with their own life and their own life impulses and life energy overall.
And now there's a different shift because with organic intelligence, that sensation, that's one aspect, but we have all these other aspects as well. There's image, there is orientation, there's meaning and there's affect. And each one of those is equally important, as important as, say, sensation. But what's most important is that we would recognize that there is a signal coming from our system, mostly unconsciously, as we saw, mostly unconsciously, that is there to provide us the help that we need in the moment.
And so the change that's really happened even within the past couple of years, because I've been like you say, I've been working here to create and connect around organic intelligence for 15 years.
And there's a different receptivity to that right now. I think people are realizing as therapists that they don't have to drag their clients in through their, their past and their difficult moments and their challenges. They don't have to make them feel the sensations that are uncomfortable.
When I was back in the, in the other training, the, the, the most common consultation question got, that I got or supervision question was, hey, how do I get them into their body?
As if, as if they were supposed to like force the spirit back into the bottle somehow when it was really looking for something else entirely. So people are to this more positive approach. And I wrote an article in a book called Somatic Oriented Therapies. And in that chapter I talk about post trauma growth guidelines and guardrails and lay out the science behind why this positive psychology approach is safer and also more effective. And so that's what I think. I'm really hopeful about what's happening now because people are responding saying, yeah, I don't want to. I keep on being dragged through the muck of my past.
And it doesn't actually change things, although for some people it does. So I'm really hopeful that people are Finding a new way of, of healing and recognizing that it can be much gentler than we've previously thought.
[00:35:47] Speaker B: Do you think that more, do you think that people are more in touch or less in touch with their bodies and with their environments and with signals?
[00:36:00] Speaker A: I think less in touch, you know, with, with the sort of the universality of these smart devices and the, the social media. And I think we are being trained out of our resilience.
And so people's attention spans are getting less. And if it's, you know, if it's longer than 10 seconds, we're, we're, you know, we're swiping right already.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: Yes, I would, I would tend to agree that that's what I would expect too. And what do you think may be, or already is the consequences of that?
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Well, with, with the, with the decrease of attention span is also the decrease of resilience, which means it's just easier to feel uncomfortable.
And so this approach that doesn't require people to spend extended times in discomfort, I think is going to be really well received. And it's nice because it's natural and we grow capacity through this way.
And I think it's a hopeful sign.
And I think the thing that's most hopeful, Ramsey, is that as people begin to feel better and they begin to grow those thresholds, they grow the capacity of feeling more and it's pleasurable. We focus on what feels good and what feels good. We amplify that a little bit. We say that in a way, the job is enjoyment.
The job is enjoyment. And when people do that, then they begin to want more and they begin to seek out more and more complex situations, which means they are, you know, like, maybe I don't need to check Instagram this, this minute.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Well, the way to feel good is to look at things on your phone and to take the right pills and to, you know, get the right likes from the right people who are more popular than you and to not have to get up out of your chair.
Obviously I'm being ironic and facetious, but do you think that part of the problem is that the idea of what feels good is skewed?
[00:38:27] Speaker A: I sure do. I sure do. And the thing that we can do is get people unskewed and help them find healthy, natural pleasure. So the initial conditions for self organization in humans is orientation.
And then the next step is orientation to pleasure. Now orientation to hedonic well being. But we have caveats because that pleasure then is natural, simple human pleasure, healthy, not too intense, not substance related healthy, simple human pleasure. So we don't need any of the devices.
I think we were talking earlier going, oh, nature's pharmacy is right in inside of us and, and within us. And we can feel it.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: Yeah. So we're talking about, you know, life's simple pleasures. Right. With air quotes around it. We're talking about, you know, the, the beauty of the outdoors and, you know, the, the fluttering of a butterfly and we're talking about, you know, the smell of roses and, you know, actual real life things and then, you know, and having real experiences with other people. Yeah, I guess in, in real life that doesn't happen as much as it used to.
You, you talked about being uncomfortable.
Something that I've sort of keyed in on is that it seems like these days the. Just the idea of being uncomfortable, there's perhaps a resurgence of the value of being uncomfortable.
But, you know, if you look at the amount of air conditioning that we have and the, you know, amount of, let's say, carpeted floors and soft beds and ergonomic chairs, not that there's anything wrong with ergonomic chairs, but being comfortable, like people put a very high premium on being comfortable. Do you think that.
What do you think about that idea? And is there value to sort of extending the range of, let's say, discomfort that you can experience and do experience? Does that help to build resilience?
[00:40:51] Speaker A: It's. It's a great question. Thank you. It's in oi. One of my early sayings was trauma means unintegrated resource.
Trauma means unintegrated resource. So what you're talking about is comfort, but that it doesn't register that it's not integrated, it's just like cotton candy. Oh, I ate it, now it's gone, and I hardly even remember eating it. And so what we're talking about in healthy, simple human pleasures is the experience of that pleasure. So the job is enjoyment means there's a pleasurable moment and then we spend time with it and we give it some air. So it'll move from just something that's smoldering into then puff of flame, and then it can warm us, and that's where it can change us. So it would be, I believe, incorrect to think, oh, the way that we grow capacity is through more negative experience. Although you can, you can do training like that, it's possible. But what we're after is something different. The thing that will change the system and make us grow in capacity to experience more, more pleasant and more unpleasant is actually the growth of our thresholds through the amplification of pleasurable experience and bringing it in integrated resource like, like that, like that barrier that you had. It was there all along, but it wasn't until, like I see it and then I go, oh, yeah, that's a thing that my psyche picked that out for me. And now I get to feel the value of it. And feeling the value of it gives me a very, very different state inside. And we do that. And that's happening all the time.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: Well, we've had this entire, this entire discussion. I don't think we've said the word mindfulness yet, but I think that people might be more familiar with the idea of mindfulness than coining it as orientation. But is there, are they basically the same thing or is there a fundamental difference or distinction that you would make?
[00:43:03] Speaker A: Well, brilliant questions really, including this one. There are so many styles of mindfulness, so many traditions, so many practices.
I think that what we're doing in organic intelligence is necessary because in the west we have had such an impoverishment of our early attachment scenario, something that didn't happen in the Himalayas.
We've had the medicalization of birth. We've had the increase of early childhood trauma. We've lost the mythic structure of the way the cosmos works and the shared values of the way that our tribe should be. And in fact, most of us are a tribe of people looking for our tribe anyway.
So we have a basic fundamental disorganization built in, which keeps us from, I think, accessing the massive resources of ancient meditative traditions. So I think in terms of mindfulness, we are, we're putting some training wheels on and we're getting used to paying attention and connecting to reality by what is the most simple reality, which is the material world around us. Which, by the way, that orientation is also called in some research that I cite in that, in that chapter, the. One of the most organizing gradients of the brain.
So when we're talking about organization and self organization, orientation is the absolutely the first tool and first thing to practice getting the attention freely into the external environment.
We call it a tether into the here and now. The portal into the here and now for most of us will be orientation.
But it's just a beginning.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: So how do you, how does, how does organic intelligence work with people? Like, logistically, what do those services look like?
[00:45:09] Speaker A: It's a coaching. So one way that we work with people is we provide coaching. So on the organicintelligence.org there is a coaching directory. And so you can, you can go there and get sessions.
I Encourage people who feel like they have something to give into the world and who really care about how the world is right now and care about the planet. I encourage them to come into our coaching program. And so every September, early September, we accept people into the coaching program and 200 hours later they've got that credential and they can do this kind of OI coaching. And then the third thing that we offer is that personal resilience. The end of trauma course takes us through all of the ISOMA channels. Image, sensation, orientation, meaning and affect. And we practice receiving those gifts that are coming all the time. And we just get rehearse that so we get good at it and then we can do that integration. Remember, trauma means unintegrated resource. So we get practice integrating those resources coming all the time.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: So those are some ways I see. And where can people find you online?
[00:46:21] Speaker A: Organicintelligence.org is our website and many people find us there. And, and we also, despite being and teaching online, we take a really personal approach.
So everybody who comes into the coaching certification, I talk to every single person for half an hour or so and get to know them before the training even starts. And it's personal. That relationship really matters to us because we're organic intelligence, not artificial intelligence.
[00:46:56] Speaker B: Well, thank you, Steve. I.
This has been a really great conversation. I learned a tremendous amount and I will try to recognize my environment and orient myself appropriately and reset my expectations.
[00:47:16] Speaker A: And pleasurably, I hope.
[00:47:18] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes indeed.
Looking for more? Visit whatsworthwhile.net to listen to podcast episodes, learn from books and articles and live better by choosing healthy products and practices. I'm now offering services through worthwhile advisors for personal coaching, professional advising, speaking and group facilitation. If you or your team are ready to reduce stress and anxiety, build vitality and momentum and accomplish your goals without burning out, then please, please contact me, Ramsey Zimmerman, through the website or on social media like Instagram X or LinkedIn. Thanks.
