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Can’t believe it is almost August. Perhaps you have some time to reflect on the first half of the year, pat yourself on the back for kicking some goals, and be motivated for H2. If not, we take the body to calm :)

The most shared media pieces from the last 7 days, excerpts from program 2 in the Somatic Academy: ‘What if Love Was Your Highest Expression? Why Separation Is the Root of Our Suffering and How the Body Can Save Us:

1. A fascinating study from 1939 allowed infants to self-select their diet. Not only did all the infants thrive, but those that were previously sick healed themselves. One had rickets and self-selected cod liver oil until his bones strengthened, and then he didn’t want any more. The body knew. Which gives us cause to pause and ask: What else could the body know? Could it be able to save us in other ways? As we walk that prickly path, test how much of our lives we can quarantine with the assumption that ‘perhaps this is a projection of my internal disturbance, and my body is simply asking for safety?’ Happy people don’t live complicated lives.

   

2. The second most shared video touched on the famous meta-analysis of 218 studies, with a combined 14,000 participants, that found dance provided the highest clinical benefit for depressed patients. One pathway is BDNF. We expand that formula and see that endogenous opioids chronically upregulate BDNF. Why do endogenous opioids fall? Because we are separated. They are our scorecard of attachment. Makes sense. Why ‘consolidate’ or ‘de-prioritise’ our recent memories when we are alone? We obviously aren’t safe. We re-attach energetically, synchronously, and order is restored. Interestingly also, that marginal benefit from magic beans works on this pathway, not serotonin. Recent longitudinal studies suggest it actually reduces serotonin. Modern care industry at it again.

   

3. The third most shared video was the relationship between allergies and autism. During that chat, we bypassed the fact that people growing up on farms tend to have lower allergies. We don’t use highway science (100 people ran across the road, 1 made it, therefore the road can’t be called dangerous), we use observations, that work on probabilities. Such observations relate to activities such as drinking raw milk and being present while manure was spread. Why the connection between allergies and autism? Because glymphatic clearance gets impaired.

   

Time for an update on program 3, ‘A Fragile Elevation.’

It will be a longer one this week, and a huge data dump.

I do it because families are busy raising children and working to put food on the table. Lobby groups are funded by the government to then advise the government what to do. They have no other job. A thought that something might not be right by parents is often squashed for fear of not having enough information. Here is what we know…

There has been some recent controversy in Australia over the gender education placed in schools, after it seemed one-off ‘mistakes’ were appearing as a trend around the country in recent times. Three examples from different states to show this is not just one external provider (these sessions are often outsourced):

• Children's grades were linked to choral recitation of pledges of allegiance to LGBTQIA+.

• Another involved telling students that being gay is more ‘fun’ and they should ‘give it a try,’ along with saying the ‘+’ could mean beastiality, brother-brother love, and sister-sister love, because everything is accepted.

• Another, which appeared today, involved booklets with cartoons of threesomes and an*l sex. None of which is on the provider's website. The parent version is extremely sanitised.

Now if you find that appropriate, then what follows will likely be distressing, so I recommend unsubscribing.

We all remember sex-ed. This is not sex-ed. This is indoctrination. This is a worldview for in-grouping that is by nature exclusionary. You are either in, or you sit on the sidelines as an ‘ally’ that needs to be available for canned applause. If you aren’t one of those, then you are a hurty word. That’s not in-grouping. That’s ruling over. This is Lowest Expression Inclusion Culture.

Highest Expression Exemplar Culture asks for responsibility, not transactional rights. Everyone takes responsibility, and by doing so, we get a commercial outcome, a larger pie. We see this in simple examples of rowing alone, or rowing with six others. When we row alone, we get an endorphin jump. When we row with 6 people, we all get double the endorphins than alone, doing the same thing. We’ll come back to those endorphins later.

The cover story for this indoctrination is, of course, fairness. We want to avoid bad outcomes in childhood. Ok, so what do we know about gender diversity?

It doubled during COVID and has since halved. So, we can not rule out environmental influences. What happened in the body with COVID? Particularly long COVID? Inflammatory marker PGE2 went sky high. What does PGE2 do? It’s an endocrine disruptor. It sends testosterone up in women and down in men, fast. E.g., administering PGE2 to a bull dropped its testosterone by 75% in 2 hours.

Ok, what do we know about human DNA soups before an identification as gender diverse? Historically, three main factors are highly prevalent (1) insecure attachment (2) unresolved trauma (3) psychiatric diagnosis before identifying as gender diverse. Here are some recent stats…

(1) Insecure attachment

• A study in Australia found 82% of children identifying as gender diverse were insecurely attached to their parents. The chances of being one of those 4 out of 5 children increased by three times if they were from a non-intact family.

• A study from Finland found that 51% of children identifying as gender diverse were not living with both of their biological parents.

• A study from Italy found 73% of children identifying as gender diverse were not securely attached to their parents.

(2) Unresolved trauma

• A study in Australia found that 20% of children identifying as gender diverse already were diagnosed with PTSD.

• A study from Italy found 56% of children identifying as gender diverse had experienced four or more traumatic events.

(3) Psychiatric diagnosis

• A study from Australia found 87% of children identifying as gender diverse had a psychiatric diagnosis.

• A study from Australia found 57.3% of children had already been diagnosed with autism or ADHD, and a further 26% suspected they would reach the diagnostic threshold.

• A study from Finland found 68% of children identifying as gender diverse first had contact with psychiatric services for reasons other than gender.

Outside of younger people, the Australian Government Human Rights Assessment released its report this year, and it revealed:

• 48% of LGB people have seriously considered suicide at some point in their lives.

• 43% of Trans and gender diverse people have attempted suicide.

• 29% of LGBTIQA+ Australians rate their health as poor.

• 39% of LGBTIQA+ Australians have a disability or long-term health condition. 10% report a severe or profound disability.

• 73% of LGBTIQA+ Australians have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point in their lives.

• 25% of cisgender LGBQA+ Australians and 46% of transgender Australians have attempted suicide in the past 12 months.

• 74.8% of LGBTIQA+ Australians have had suicidal ideation in the past 12 months.

• Up to 40% of LGBTIQA+ people live below the poverty line.

• Rates of unemployment for LGBTIQA+ people are at 12.7%, and 20% for trans and gender diverse people, more than double the national rate.

A recent study out of the US found that children identifying as gender diverse tend to have unresolved trauma, insecure attachment and pre-existing psychiatric diagnoses but also tend to:

• Not participate in sport.

• Have high socio-economic status (more likely to be supportive of gender diversity in the US)

Ok, so let’s say the identifying as gender diverse/trans comes about. What further adjusted risk associations do we see?

• The biggest one is schizophrenia, with a 28 times higher risk.

• The next biggest is ADHD, with a 6 times higher risk.

• Autism isn’t far behind with a 5 times higher risk.

But incredibly, people identifying as GD/trans exhibit higher autism symptoms than people already diagnosed with autism.

What are we forced to examine at this moment? The GABA switch (Is GABA inhibitory or excitatory?). Too much chloride due to upregulation of NKCC1, and downregulation of KCC2. What are these primarily driven by? Or when do they become out of order? High cortisol, low oxytocin and low endogenous opioid expression. Trauma and detachment. That’s why kids in orphanages rock.

How would we know if this is really the area to be looked at? Sensory sensitivity. This is how we most obviously feel GABA as excitatory. This (which is why, if we don’t help bodies to safety, if this is the case) is how we get chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia in later years. So how are sensory sensitivity scores? Higher than autism.

Given what we know about the defense cascade, that the more our body is fighting for survival, the more likely we act ego-centrically, how is empathy? Worse than females with autism, and if an autism diagnosis is present, almost half that of females without autism.

What have we done? We repeated past mistakes.

We used the least socially dominant relationship as a safety net: children.

That’s what we did with ADHD and autism. This is your identity, even though it’s a trauma response, statistically speaking, from the prior generation. When we feel energetically aroused about that, we recognise that our grandparents also had a say. Then we look at the chain in our hand and realise if we continue to play that blame game we end up talking to a monkey who wants to steal our sunglasses. Not our fault. Is our responsibility to investigate. No different with gender diversity.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with sexuality. What we are talking about exclusively is personal distress scores that are self-reported and clinically observed. Everybody deserves to be free from suffering. How have we decided to attempt that? Telling 7-year-old children they are responsible for the emotional regulation of someone with insecure attachment, unresolved trauma, and pre-existing psychiatric disorders. We have asked 7-year-old children to be psychologists. They aren’t. They are children.

What does that do to them?

Firstly, we have added questions to the list. For the first time in human history we don’t know where grandpa went, we don’t know how to downregulate and quarantine our thoughts, and now we don’t even know what gender you are. Have fun. But fairness, right? So surely there is a large percentage of people we are looking after by suggesting people might fit this category. No, based on current statistics, there is a 95-97% chance that won’t be their life story, and yet, with all the stress that exists today for them, and us putting it on them from our stress that is contagious, we ask them: who am I?

Secondly, it tells them that inside of them there is something evil; they probably can’t clearly identify it because they don’t feel evil. They have never been evil, but someone else doesn’t feel good. It must have been them. We have told them that any distress felt by another person they own. We know that in the therapy environment, we call that parentification, and it takes years to unlearn. We have just psychologically abused a child. We are telling a generation of children they are responsible for other people’s emotional states, and they are wrong about their own. You are not safe. You could be evil.

Who is the most likely perpetrator of violence against a gender diverse person? Their partner. Rates of intimate partner violence amongst gender diverse relationships are multiples of non-gender diverse relationships. What contributes towards the likelihood of that?

• Sensory sensitivity is a strong predictor of aggression.

• People diagnosed with autism are two times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime.

• People diagnosed with ADHD are 6.5 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime.

Which means we are doing two things.

We are telling a 7-year-old child they are responsible for the circumstances of a life that arrives at identifying as gender diverse, that on a probability basis experienced:

1. Insecure attachment.

2. Trauma exposure.

3. Endocrine disruption.

4. Inactivity.

5. Lowest Expression Inclusion Culture

But, importantly, we are also depriving care from a body that has just been through that. The only reason we can possibly get away with it is because of a complete dereliction of duty to observe what we have just read. Modern mental health care is not health care. It increasingly practices ‘affirming care’ which is simply asking a drowning person to save themselves. Psychologists have exported their job to the person in the room seeking help and called it ‘lived experience.’

There was a 75% hit rate on not wanting to be here anymore. That young body doesn’t know that BDNF is negatively associated with suicidal ideation, is lower in people identifying as gender diverse and physical activity is strongly positively associated with BDNF. That young body doesn’t know IL-6 is positively associated with both ADHD and autism symptoms and goes around upregulating excitatory synapses in our brain. That young body doesn’t know that gut dysbiosis means we can acquire new fears, but not extinguish old ones. That body does know all of that, but neither does their psychologist who has a PhD.

But let’s revisit endorphins. They are wholly part of the process of neural synchrony. What is neural synchrony? Your brain, and my brain, act as one. It is how a parent maintains a child's homeostasis because they are biologically incapable of doing it themselves. It is how parents develop an immature brain. It is also how we consolidate individuals. For example, we can tell with 92% accuracy if someone is relgiously affiliated because they will be synched with other people religiously affiliated (in the same town), those non religiosuly affiliated are randomly firing alone. We are dissolving the illusion we are separate, and every cultural thumbdrive around the world arrived at the same place, and today, we have the science to explain why. When our brains sync, we like each other. Of course we do. We think someone else is us, and we are inherently invested in ourselves.

What is important to bring that about?

The usual, such as eye gaze, touch, turn-taking, but what lights a fire under it is ritual. That’s why religion achieves self-other blur beyond simply drumming, singing or dancing. What does that mean? The following are positively associated with neural synchrony:

1. Shared beliefs.

2. Similar level of positive expression during activities.

3. Co-operation, not competition (including minimising differences in appearance).

4. Identification with exemplar of shared narrative.

5. Synchronised behaviour.

Then what happens? You get an attentive, empathetic classroom.

That’s why people in the military have the most diverse friendship groups. No need to picture make or virtue signal. We take off our human suits and just link brains.

1. You have one mission.

2. With your brothers and sisters.

3. Who wear the same clothes and have shaved their heads.

4. Here are the heroes who have completed it before you.

5. Get going.

Now tell me how this possibly links brains:

1. Telling one child they are evil, and the other child is a victim.

2. Telling one child to pledge allegiance and the other child to receive the ring kiss.

3. Telling one child to be canned applause for the other that’s having more ‘fun’.

4. Telling one child the exemplar is the next person with a problem worse than theirs.

5. Telling all children that whatever they feel, want, and desire is valid (even if it is a survival response).

It doesn’t.

This Lowest Expression Inclusion Culture refuses to admit it’s a worldview, assumes it’s human progress, and so dangerously rules over people due to this superior position. The people passionate about this topic are doing it in schools because, on a probability basis, they don’t have children of their own. This is how they pass their legacy on, through other people’s children. We rarely speak about legacy but it is a powerful, invisible, shaper of our lives. If this were not the case, wouldn’t we just enjoy rights in adult spaces?

The state loves it because anything to do with rights is theirs to administer, which means ultimately, they make themselves god-like. They also simply borrow ‘diversity’ goodwill, which means you don’t ask questions about the economy. No different with business. Poison rivers, manufacture in sweatshops? No worries, we’ve got a rainbow flag on the website.

Ok, that was a lot, but hopefully it provides parents with information they need to make educated decisions for their children, and psychologists motivation to upskill in the face of a changing world.

Over to Monday Meditation. We looked at estrogen this week and its relationship with the startle response, did some alternate nostril breathing, then enjoyed the time on the other side of rebalancing.

Lastly, our country rankings. The Aussies stay in pole position, oi oi oi. The yanks have raced into second (kicking the Deutsch off the podium), and Rule Britannia comes in third. Again, to all new entrants, welcome. I hope the material serves you and your village well 🥇🇦🇺🥈🇺🇸🥉🇬🇧

I’ll leave it there for now.

Here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas

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That’s it, ey? World Cup is over. Almost like the weather knows it. Sweaters are back on in Northern Europe, but that is an incentive to clear out the toxins in the sauna. Anyway, hope the week has been kind to you. Let’s begin.

The most shared media pieces from the last 7 days, excerpts from program 2 in the Somatic Academy: ‘What if Love Was Your Highest Expression? Why Separation Is the Root of Our Suffering and How the Body Can Save Us:

1. We started with the intelligence scores, showing a 10,000-year trend of a positive selection for genes we consider associated with high levels of education today. Then we threw a bucket of cold water on that by seeing the trend over the last century, where it has reversed. Same with brain volumes, so we shouldn’t be surprised. Who has smaller brains? People with ADHD. Lowest Expression Inclusion Culture cheerleads our devolution. But we don’t like hearing such news today because we like to pretend we are the most evolved. Also a worldview of the last century. I am here, with a recent birthdate, I must be superior. Yet, your grandma going to church each Sunday was an anti-inflammatory event. Which inflammatory cytokine has a dose-dependent inverse relationship with Church visits? IL-6. What is that associated with? ADHD symptom severity. Why? Because it goes around to your synapses and upregulates the excitatory ones, downregulates the inhibitory ones, and when we have too much neural excitability, the brain starts to shrink. Do we have to go to Church? No. We can if we want, but what we are required to do is recognise our new baseline. If we are not getting together and carrying out an activity that upregulates the endogenous opioid system (e.g. World Cup) and downregulates inflammation (e.g. yoga, sauna, cold water swimming), we will be disorganised. That’s not a stranger’s fault. That’s not a school’s fault. We don’t have a rights problem. We have a responsibility problem. We…take…the…body…to…calm.

   

2. The second most shared video of the past week was today’s video. A simple reminder that if we take the gut bacteria from a human with ADHD and place it in a rodent, its hippocampus falls apart. Why? The hippocampus is one of the most stress-sensitive regions of the brain (and also called the mediator of our personality). The gut is quite capable of remodelling our brains, simply via inflammation. When we tell children ADHD is their identity, we are telling them to turn around and swing amongst the branches again. Let’s not do that.

   

3. The third most shared video can help us with the second most shared. 15 years ago, the ADHD research centre in the Netherlands discovered that an elimination diet was able to drop ADHD symptoms by over 50% in as little as 9 weeks. They were so pleased with the result that they came up with the term ‘food-induced ADHD’ and recommended that doctors screen for this sub-group before medication. What did everyone do instead? Head off on the biggest ADHD diagnosis drive in recorded history. Expand the entry requirements, destigmatise the condition amongst both parents and patients, and successfully increase prescriptions by 10 times in the last 10 years. Cultural poverty.

   

An update on work in progress. First section of program 3 is drafted. We pick up the GABA switch, which we also covered in program 1 (The Defense Cascade), but take it a step deeper across the lifecycle.

What is the GABA switch? When you are a bun in the oven that is your mum, your GABA is excitatory. Ooo, flash bang, our world shakes. ‘GABA? Excitatory? I heard it was our primary inhibitory neurotransmitter!’ Yes, that’s correct. 10 points. However, it is only inhibitory when the plug in the chloride sink is pulled. That plug is KCC2. That pulling is gradual. Like most of our development, it takes about two decades.

However, importantly, it doesn’t happen on its own. The primary mechanism for its upregulation is oxytocin. Oh damn. There it is. The root of our suffering is our separation. What is the most influential factor in predicting a child’s oxytocin levels? Their attachment scores to their parents. Our humanity as we imagine it is a fragile elevation above feral. It is maintained by active intervention. Today we pretend it’s a fate. It’s not. We are seeing the consequences of that. What conditions are associated with low KCC2 (and thus immature GABA)? We know at least:

• ADHD.

• Autism.

• Seizures.

• Schizophrenia.

• Stress reactivity.

• Sensory sensitivity.

The seizure is interesting (particularly as someone who has experienced them). The by-products actually ramp up KCC2. So we can say a seizure is like a kill switch on neural excitability. Personally, I’ve slept upwards of 20 hours after one.

Over to Monday Meditation. This week we started with a reminder of the relationship between sex hormones and stress. That is, the more stressed you are, the less fertile you will be and the more terrible you will feel. Not rocket science, but again, our culture today refuses to target them despite their decades-long decline that Dr Shana Swan calls ‘Countdown’ because projecting trends into the future will mean we can’t reproduce. Fun. Then we carried out our regular Aum breathing and meditation.

Lastly, our country rankings. The Aussies retain top spot, Poms in next, and Germany in third as a country, but the Deutsch have seemingly been overtaken by the culmination of all other countries. So to all new entrants, welcome. I hope the material serves you well.

🥇🇦🇺🥈🇬🇧🥉🇩🇪

I’ll leave it there for now.

Here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas

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Hope you are keeping well. Can’t believe that’s all we’ll get to see of Mbappe this World Cup, but Spain definitely were the better side on the night. Looking forward to tonight’s match.

Let’s begin with our most shared media pieces from the last 7 days, excerpts from the newly launched program 2 in the Somatic Academy: ‘What if Love Was Your Highest Expression? Why Separation Is the Root of Our Suffering and How the Body Can Save Us:

1. The most shared in the last week was actually yesterday’s video, which explored the autoimmune hypothesis of a subset of autism patients. Anti-HSP60, anti-HSP70 and anti-HSP90 (along with anti-gliadin antibodies that we will talk about another time) were uncovered in children with autism. Which is fascinating because we may be handed some more paint on the palette for why sauna (4 x increase in heat shock proteins that remain elevated for 48 hours) has been found to be so beneficial for those diagnosed with autism, and why parents often report an alleviation of autism symptoms in children experiencing fever. These heatshock proteins (not the attacking antibodies) are associated with, at the very least, clearing chloride and ramping up the endogenous opioid system. Why is that helpful? Because GABA, our primary inhibitory neurotransmitter, turns excitatory with excessive chloride. A pathway sufficient to induce autism on its own. We feel this as sensory sensitivity, and this has been explored as a stepping stone to later chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, which is over-represented in those diagnosed with autism (again, why ‘diversity’ lobby groups are carrying out cultural abuse). The second part, the endogenous opioid system, we have explored countless times, so let’s simply remind ourselves that it is (1) our scorecard for social attachment, (2) its expression is inversely associated with autism symptom severity.

   

2. The second-most-shared video related to blood flow in the brain in those diagnosed with autism and/or ADHD. People diagnosed with ADHD have poor blood flow in the frontal region. A region associated, of course, with top-down control. People with autism have poor blood flow in the temporal region. A region associated with interpreting other people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour. How important are these blood flow variations? Very, it’s correlated with symptom severity for both conditions. What does this blood flow represent? Not only energy expenditure, but also the very evolution of the brain. I know it doesn’t sound pleasant when I say ‘we are turning around and heading back up the tree,’ but if we don’t place our backs up against the wall from time to time, we are not motivated to carry out our rescue, rescue for our loved ones, and appropriate care for our patients. When we don’t, we become complicit in human suffering, which cascades down generations. It’s believed we had a sixfold increase in blood flow to the brain over the last three million years, which led to our separation from other hominins and to modern humans having twice the brain energy consumption of non-human primates. What can we do to steady the ship? Well, one rescue that may also be implicated in the disorganisation is breathing. Sure, our heart pumps our blood, but guess what? If you practice slow and/or abdominal breathing, the suction effect can raise respiratory contributions to brain blood flow to be on par with the heart. Remember, one of the three ingredients that predicts ADHD with 85% accuracy is dysregulated breathing.

   

3. The third most shared video touched on the brain as well, this time our cultural practice of reading, and the consequences of down-prioritising it. Illiteracy has long been associated with lower brain volumes, so finding out that adolescents who read 12 hours per week have larger brains shouldn’t surprise us. However, what is interesting is the spider web complications of the choice to, or not to, read. Reading, particularly fiction, is emotional training. It builds emotional literacy, which is positively associated with emotional regulation. Then we look to see where we might be carrying out that regulation and find that the accuracy with which a mother can identify the emotional state of her child is positively associated with that child’s oxytocin levels (levels inversely associated with ADHD, anxiety and depressive symptoms). Of course, they are. We find similar connections from a million different doorways. If our emotional needs are not met, our body assumes we are abandoned, even in the presence of others. What does that default to? Low self-esteem. ‘My non-negotiable needs were invisible; therefore, I must not be worthy enough to be seen.’ Untrue, of course, but that doesn’t stop the body from running that script until we change it.

   

On to our meditation monday for the week. The session involved a short chat covering the relationship between the GABA switch (inhibitory-excitatory) and sensory sensitivity, then we carried out some Aum breathing and explored what state we find on the other side of that.

For an update on work in progress (program 3), we can look at plasticity genes. Why do we do that? Because they once again take the ‘diversity’ crowd out the backyard and hose them down with ice-cold water. Yes, for example, possessing the DRD4 7-repeat allele means you’ll have a 45% higher risk of being diagnosed with ADHD, but we can not stop ourselves from asking why, and when we do, the results are quite surprising.

Possessing this allele actually is protective at baseline, and then it switches after exposure to adversity. What’s an example? Prenatal smoking. If you were not exposed to prenatal smoking and you possessed this allele, you actually have a lower chance of being diagnosed with ADHD. If you were exposed to prenatal smoking with this risk allele, then it swaps. We can substitute ‘prenatal smoking’ with about 7 different adversity loads that we will explore in detail in due course. The important observation is that the genetic fate argument is a poverty of perspective and kneecaps us from reaching our highest expression.

Lastly, let’s visit our country rankings for the month. We have Australia taking out the top spot for the highest number of somatic academy program entrants, followed by the UK and in third place, Germany. Wishing you all the very best in your body-led journeys. 🥇🇦🇺🥈🇬🇧🥉🇩🇪

I’ll leave it there for now.

Here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas

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It’s been a few weeks since a wrap-up. Let’s check out the top three shared pieces of media in that time, excerpts from the newly launched program 2 in the Somatic Academy: ‘What if Love Was Your Highest Expression? Why Separation Is the Root of Our Suffering and How the Body Can Save Us:

1. The third most-shared video covered an interesting study in which only three metrics could predict whether a bodily vessel in a sample had ADHD or not. What were they? Skin conductance, heart rate variability and breathing rates. Funnily enough, we could almost say one, because breathing rates feed into skin conductance and HRV. ADHD is not a healthy variation, ADHD is not a form of diversity, ADHD is not a problem for everyone else but ourselves to solve (inclusion culture). ADHD is disorganisation that can be brought about from pesticide exposure, prenatal stress, and parental lifetime unresolved trauma. Which again, we could just say one, take….the….body…to…safety.

   

2. The second most-shared video featured a longitudinal study from Sweden, in which the strongest predictor of a future autism diagnosis was infant omega-3 levels. Where does a child get their omega-3 levels from? Their mother. The oven to the bun. Why are mum’s omega-3 levels lower? Depends. It could be due to diet, but it also could be due to unresolved trauma, where the chart of omega-3 in a body with PTSD looks like the chart of an infant’s omega-3 levels that increase the probability of autism. How is this carried out if this is all rather new information to us? One pathway is neuroinflammation and its role in impairing neural pruning (which, while very important in early life, continues throughout our entire life). Again, this time for the other side of the continuum: Autism is not diversity; it is a deficit.

   

3. The most-shared video involved a study with quite surprising results. Researchers wanted to see if Lactobacillus supplementation might help reduce the incidence of eczema, but when they conducted their follow-up, they appeared to have solved ADHD/ASD (at least for this sample) instead. Not one of the kids who received Lactobacillus gained a diagnosis. Where is Lactobacillus found? Raw milk. What was consumed by your great-grandparents to the first person who tested out the produce of another species? Raw milk. In Australia, it’s illegal. In Germany, it’s not, and I had a glass this morning. Has it been tested as a rescue in the research environment? Yes. Seeing up to a 1/5 drop in autism symptoms in a matter of weeks. Do we have to consume raw milk (if it is legal in our country)? No. Do we have to recognise that not doing so is a deduction from the benefit column of our gut microbiome stability? Yes. This is a mature, allostatic load approach to our well-being. My great-grandparents worked outside, and did not have a vitamin-D deficit. My great-grandparents ate organic food and did not have intestinal permeability from inorganic food. My great-grandparents drank raw milk that beefed up Lactobacillus abundance, and were, on average, far less likely to exhibit ADHD or autism like behaviour.

   

So let’s take a check in here. Which is what program 2 is designed to do. Program 1 mapped our nervous system as it tried to save us, with predictable responses to rising/persistent adversity. Program 2 says (A) how do we come back down, but importantly (B) what dirty water am I currently swimming in that is preventing me from doing so?

If I currently believe in neurodiversity affirming care.

If I currently expect to replace cognitive cassette tapes, regardless of the state of a bodily vessel.

If I currently dispense magic beans to a bodily vessel, self-identifying with a mental health diagnosis, that struggles to accept a cognitive cassette tape change.

I am adhering to a worldview.

A worldview that believes it is ‘fair’ to place concrete boots on children who have rampant inflammation in their bodies, positively associated with symptom severity.

A worldview that believes it is ‘rational’ to expect bodies high up on the defense cascade to be conducive to the supplementation of disempowering beliefs with empowering beliefs, and reappraisal of the catalogue of bad outcomes, when the body is, due to non-safety, designed to absolutely not do that, for our safety, during this time of non-safety.

A worldview that believes that ‘care’ looks like lifetime subscribers to magic beans that atrophy our brains, detoriate our bones and induce testicular hypofunction.

But guess what, that’s ok. Because once we realise it is a worldview based on irrational beliefs that produces behaviour with really bad consequences, we simply dislodge it. But we also commit to understanding our own propensity not to admit we are drowning without sight of a rescue helicopter, so recognising the worldview is likely to naturally arise only when an alternative is placed in front of us.

Then it all becomes a beautiful game of pursuing our highest expression: love.

What does that look like in the body? Self-other blur.

What is the prerequisite for that? Low personal distress scores.

We swap ‘rights’ of ‘inclusion’, ‘fairness’, ‘diversity’ for responsibility. Both as a patient and as a practitioner.

We radically investigate the bodily vessel, remove as many ‘loads’ as possible, and set up as many supportive structures as possible, as we turn off the survival responses and see who we might meet in a state of downregulation. What type of abundance, acceptance and even attachment do we find, once we become sovereign again over our bodily vessel?

Perhaps to help us towards that, we might find this week's Monday meditation useful, which includes a brief chat about how our bodies can begin life disorganised and, of course, practising our regular downregulation tools of breathwork and meditation (that turn off these epigenetic changes).

Or if you are really into it, then obviously you are invited to join those who have just begun the second program in the Somatic Academy: ‘What if Love Was Your Highest Expression? Why Separation Is the Root of Our Suffering and How the Body Can Save Us.

Alternatively, as always, if you prefer text (or as an optional addition to the course), the latest book is now available exclusively on Amazon: Australia, USA, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Japan.

I’ll leave it there for now.

Here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas

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Hope the week has started off well for you. Shock defeat for Germany last night in the World Cup, perhaps it’s a year of upsets, could be good for Australia, fingers crossed :)

Swinging by with the launch of the latest program from the Somatic Academy, entitled: What if Love Was Your Highest Expression? Why Separation Is the Root of Our Suffering and How the Body Can Save Us.

Program 1, The Defense Cascade, set the stage for this effort in alleviating human suffering via landing at the conclusion that despite mass market approaches operating on the belief system that our mental wellbeing is cognitive, individual and beginning the moment we open our eyes, data held in our species library suggests it is body-led, collective and intergenerational.

The effort of program 2 builds a Rosetta Stone for understanding how both traditional and modern somatic approaches to trauma resolution can be used as complementary additions (often as a first stop priority) for practitioners meeting patients with ADHD, autism, panic disorder, c-PTSD and depression.

A scalable toolkit is offered, enabling re-mobilisation out of passive defense responses and a return to sovereignty over one’s body, with a resulting call to action to rebuild the lost village that previously kept our nervous system from picking up survival responses as the status quo.

Enrol Now

FEATURING

• 5 somatic reintegration case studies.

• 7 practical body-work sessions.

• 30+ hours of course material.

YOU WILL LEARN

• The latest research findings on trauma resolution and how they compare with both traditional and mass-market approaches.

• The latest research findings on the social evolution of the brain and how culture today has contributed towards predictable disorganisation and distress.

• Practical exercises for regaining safety in the body (a prerequisite for memory recall and consolidation).

YOU WILL BE ENCOURAGED TO EXPLORE

• How to take the body into a receptive state for trauma resolution.

• How to take the body into a receptive state for sustainable attachment.

• How to rebuild a cultural thumbdrive that defends against trauma, its non-resolution and its subsequent passing down to the next generation that feeds social abandonment.

Once again, the delivery is designed for self-paced daily consumption over 12 weeks (videos are approximately 15 minutes long).

Please note that while this is prepared for practitioners, individuals curious about self-directed healing are welcome to enrol; however, it is highly recommended that you engage with this material as a complementary asset alongside your private therapy sessions.

Start Now

As was provided in the previous program, course material has been collated in text format (with 1,300+ research citations and ~300 figures) and is available to be consumed on its own or as an optional addition to the online program and is available exclusively to Amazon: Australia, USA, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Japan.

I’ll leave it there for now. Have a great week.

To your healing 💙,

Jas

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Here we are, another week, and counting down the days to the football World Cup. Best of luck to your nation!

Let’s get into the most shared videos of the week, of course, excerpts from program 1 in the Somatic Academy: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’

1. The most shared video of the week was the relationship between ADHD/ASD and glymphatic clearance. Personally, I view this as one of the clearest examples of cultural abuse we have available for the experiments in ‘neurodiversity’ over the past decade. We tell humans, inside a bodily vessel with a brain atop it, swimming in neurotoxins, to stay where they are, enjoy where they are, and self-identify with where they are. Behaviour with consequences. What consequences are there more than those we already experience? Well, this is one pathway for the frequently observed 3-6 times higher risk for dementia in people diagnosed with ADHD/ASD. These are not actions of a serious species. These are not actions of a culture in a state of abundance. We seek to alleviate human suffering using data, or we worship dogma and perpetuate it. The choice is ours.

   

2. Speaking of dogma over data. This very same era has attempted to pretend gender doesn’t exist, which requires putting a padlock on the species library and getting very drunk. One example to free ourselves from such self-sabotage is hormones. Elevated testosterone in women frequently shows associations with anxiety, depression, panic attack frequency and irritable bowel syndrome. Uncomfortable situations, but situations that also have spillover effects. Testosterone in females is inversely associated with attention to infant faces, a problem because eye gaze is critical for neural synchrony, which is itself critical for child brain development. However, nature is clever (when we allow it to do its thing). Testosterone levels in women fall after caring for children. Who experiences the greatest falls? Women with the highest cortisol levels, which, of course, reveals again that testosterone is only there because the body is trying to save us, it rises in women along with perceived stress scores (it falls in men under the same conditions). Again, we choose to be curious about our experience, or we choose to be ignorant of it.

   

3. The third most-shared video was the one posted today, which touched on the relationship between breathing rate and body temperature. Why should we be interested in body temperature? Because it is a marker of immune activation. What does sustained immune activation do? It makes us sensory sensitive. That’s anybody. People without autism in lockstep with trauma exposure, and people with an autism diagnosis in lockstep with trauma exposure. Why bring up breath rate in regard to this? Because it’s trainable and has a bidirectional relationship with inflammation. That means, if we use breathwork, something mass market approaches strangely exclude from the software installed in frontline defenders, we regain sovereignty over our experience, surely a goal we all seek?

   

Our meditation for the coming week, which has just been sent out to those signed up for Monday meditation, is an exercise in attention regulation. A skill every cultural thumbdrive around the world encourages us to elevate, a skill today we are struggling to maintain.

Regarding work in progress, I am very pleased to share that filming for program two of the Somatic Academy is currently underway. Program 1 is our first step. We understand how any bodily vessel moves from safety to shutdown, which helps us understand where we are on the defense cascade. Program 2 is our second step. We understand how to take that bodily vessel down the cascade, which can only be achieved by learning to feel safe in the body, learning to resolve trauma in the body, and learning how our environment can influence our chances of achieving both goals.

I’ll leave it there for now.

Here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas

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A little later than usual this week due to some travel requirements, but back on board now, and I do hope the month has started off smoothly for you.

Let’s begin with the most shared videos, all of course excerpts from the Somatic Academy program: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’

1. The most shared video of the week covered the sex hormone profile of COVID patients in the intensive care unit. While obviously we would all prefer not to have a repeat of that period in our lives, it has offered us a large-scale sample of what being sick in the body looks like, and what it looks like is infertility. Those who have enrolled in the Somatic Academy will be well aware of just how important our sex hormones are to our mental health, and how absurd it is that our sex hormones are not immediately targetted for repair due to high testosterone in women and low testosterone in men predicting ego-centrism, anxiety, depression, anger, panic attacks, agoraphobia, ADHD symptoms and PTSD symptoms, as a few examples. Imagine that, we sit down in the hot seat, and the moment after our discussions meet the threshold for a diagnosis, we receive a checklist that includes how to reach our age-adjusted level of fertility. Wouldn’t that be something?

   

2. The second most shared video explored the connection between casual sex attitudes in college and birth weight. Relevant to the target areas of this project, interestingly, ADHD scores shared a very similar relationship. That is, low birth weight predicts higher ADHD symptoms and higher likelihood of a positive view of casual sex. This is one of the moments, of course, that we recognise the intergenerational nature of our experience, because we can’t control our birth weight, but our parents can. If they failed to pair-bond and our father was not around during pregnancy, this increases the risk of low birthweight by 70%. If our mum followed a plant-based diet during pregnancy, this increases the risk of low birthweight by 170%.

   

3. The third most shared video of the week related to the transfer of arousal, which is one of the most potent examples of our cultural poverty today. We have known for a very long time that arousal can be transferred between humans, and interestingly, even between different species. E.g. our dogs quite readily catch our stress. We, quite readily, ignore that data, whether between us and our pets, or between us and our partners and children. What helps us do that is allocating symptoms representative of this transfer to the next generation as wholly their own and uncorrelated with our personal distress scores. Such behaviour is facilitated and perpetuated by front-line defenders, who are installed with the care software of today that choses to actively avoid the data we hold on ourselves in the species library. Who suffers most from this departure from truth, and charge toward magic beans for all? Young boys with autism. Why? Because males receive arousal from females more than females do from males. Because children receive arousal from adults more than adults receive from children. Because the transfer of arousal is correlated with autism symptom severity. Once again we are reminded that the highest act of love we can carry out for another is our own healing.

   

Moving over to work-in-progress. I’ve shared the sacred roles of mum and dad a number of times. Mum is bottom-up, dad is top-down. What happens when dad is not around? We have a 5% smaller DLPFC (ADHD is 8%), an area of the brain that drives our top-down regulation but is also positively associated with GABA levels, self-esteem, and generosity. How is this carried out? Via neural synchrony.

When a father engages in a task with his child, they synchronise in this area of the brain.

The more they do, the more securely attached they will be. The more a child does with their mother, the less securely attached they will be. Why? Because their bodies are asking for bottom-up co-regulation from mum.

Moving on to our Monday meditation for the week, we returned to safe harbour that is frequently visited: loving-kindness. A well-studied meditation technique that not only drops cortisol but also ups oxytocin. Yes, we can close the gap that is the root of our suffering by simply sitting down with ourselves. What would the world look like if we all more frequently chose that pathway? We can only wonder.

I’ll leave it there for now.

Here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas

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Wishing you a wonderful start to the new week. Here is a recap of our last week in body-led healing, which hopefully injects a heavy dose of motivation for the ‘reclaiming our emotional sovereignty’ column of life. Let’s get into it.

First up, the three most shared videos, all of course excerpts from the Somatic Academy program: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’

1. The most-shared video of the week featured findings from a multi-decade longitudinal study on infant attachment and brain development. Adults, aged 22 years old, were found to have significantly larger amygdala sizes if they were classified as insecurely attached to their mother at 18 months old. What happens when we have a large amygdala? This is associated with low oxytocin, high anxiety, high depression, high PTSD symptoms, and high autism symptoms. How can our brain development be predicted two decades later? Because attachment representations rarely change. We can check in on you at 18 months, at 6 years, at 16 years and then even swap parent for partner, and continue the experiments throughout your life, and what tends to be revealed is that insecure attachment is a lost script of giving and receiving love, likely starting way before the parents of that child were graded as being insecurely attached to their infant. How do we fix it? Starting with shrinking the amygdala, yoga has consistently been shown to reduce amygdala volumes, and compassionate meditation reduces amygdala activity (on a per minute of practice basis). Sex hormones have also shown a relationship where low estrogen in women and low testosterone in men is associated with higher amygdala volumes. Preventing amygdala volumes from growing in the first place requires us to admit that children don’t raise themselves, and love is our highest expression. The latter also requires us to remember that it is not a word. It's an action of dissolving the illusion that we are separate, which is only possible when distress scores are low.

   

2. The second most shared video relates to the last line we wrote for the first. When examining cortisol levels in infants and their mothers, differences were observed across days of the week. What days? Work days versus home days. Shock, horror. Of course, we don’t wake up on Sunday like we wake up on Monday. But what is surprising (for our species that has thrown out its membership card to our library of data on ourselves), is that a child’s nervous system walks in lock-step. Of course, they do. Children are designed to be mirrors unto us. That is a gift when we are willing to move towards our truth, because they reveal where we are not whole. In today’s culture, however, we don’t prioritise downregulation, having not done so for so long, we don’t even know how to anymore, and then we pretend a child’s disorganised state is their own (assisted by front-line defenders installed with software to simply diagnose and dispense).

   

3. The third most shared video involved a comparison between 12 weeks of yoga, CBT or magic beans on hippocampal volumes. 12 weeks of yoga increase it, CBT and magic beans, decrease it. Why? Because cortisol atrophies the hippocampus. Which is to say, stress atrophies the hippocampus. A smaller hippocampus, noted as our personality mediator, is associated with perceived stress, PTSD, anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism, dissociation, OCD, substance abuse, eating disorders, low socioeconomic status and insecure attachment. Otherwise said as: every disorganised state. But, importantly, that is not our fate. The hippocampus is quite capable of restoring itself when we take the body to safety. There is a per-hour, per-week association with hippocampus volumes in yoga practitioners.

   

Right, so stress = separation. That separation is the root of our suffering and puts holes in our bodily vessel. For our update on work in progress, we ask: What would our ancestors have done, having likely felt these same circumstances long ago? Dragging carts with triangular wheels is exhausting. Instead, we found round ones. What was that? Culture. Within that culture was a goal and many tools to achieve it. Of course, we didn’t call it culture, we called it everyday life. But today, we call it culture, because we ejected the thumb drive and patted ourselves on the back for doing so. What happened? We objectively become more stupid:

Genetic expression of what we classify as intelligent today had been steadily increasing for the last 10,000 years, until it recently began not just to decelerate but to decline. When? When the boomers were born. The generation that swapped miracles for magic beans.

This isn’t a debate on higher powers. This is a debate about the behaviour we engaged in surrounding those beliefs. It doesn’t mean you need to follow your grandparents’ way of life. It does mean we have to ask what new level we are working from, and what new tools we will use to take ourselves back up when we don’t.

For example, if you sit next to someone and compassionately think about them (prayer/loving-kindness meditations), your heart rate begins to synchronise.

What outside of compassion helps? Being able to regulate your attention, using that attention to be engaged in the consumption of a shared story, a shared story that you and those around you are familiar with. Boom, doesn’t matter if the story is real or not, many hearts become one.

What also helps? Having an exemplar. That is, a hero within this shared story of compassion we are hearing. When we appropriate that role, rather than acting as ourselves, we dedicate ourselves more to what is in front of us. It's a legal performance enhancer. Another such enhancer is the degree to which our hearts just synchronised, which predicts, with 70% accuracy, whether a group can reach consensus on a problem.

What do we do today?

• We pretend attention dysregulation is a form of diversity, which allows us to (1) not train it, (2) yell at people who tell us we should because they aren’t accepting our lowest expression, (3) take magic beans (that shrink the hippocampus).

• We decided after that we would wave a flag of ‘acceptance’ and ‘diversity,’ as we used these displays of lowest expressions as exemplars, and then popped those people in front of our children in schools to make sure our trauma is definitely intergenerational, and those genes related to intelligence, absolutely will keep falling.

• We chose autonomy over attachment, which means we don’t even tell or consume stories with others anymore. Firstly, because we can’t understand they were meant to reveal truth to us, rather than always be truthful. Secondly, because we put our brains through a shredder of infinite scrolling, individually. Thirdly, because we no longer strive for consensus, we defend any random thought that pops into our mind on Thursday, no matter where on the defense cascade it was born.

These are not abundant times, my friends. We have work to do, but the best part of committing to that new version of us is that we firmly set a basement level of dysregulation. Each day we commit to love as our highest expression, acknowledge that safety in the body is the gateway towards that, and build new floors to stand upon that take us towards what we can be, not ring fence what we can fall to.

One such way we can do that is through breathwork, one such tool of breathwork is the lion’s breath, which is also the focus of this weeks monday meditation.

Finishing up, we go to our country scorecard. The land of the free has taken top spot as we move towards the final week of May. Behind, in second place, is the land of the POMS, happy Empire Day to you for yesterday (cheers for sending me to the sunshine). In third place, the land of the friendly. Thanks to all who have taken an interest in the Somatic Academy project. I certainly hope it serves you well.

🥇🇺🇸🥈🇬🇧🥉🇨🇦

I’ll leave it there for now.

Here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas

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Here we are, another week in review is upon us. Lots to cover, so let’s get stuck in.

First up, the three most shared videos, all of course excerpts from the Somatic Academy program: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’

1. The third most shared video covered a study of children who were graded as being insecurely attached to their parents. Researchers wanted to compare their response when engaging in a stressful task with either a friendly stranger or a dog. When the children completed the task with a dog, they released 75% less cortisol than when they completed the task with a friendly stranger. Let’s remember what moves inversely with cortisol: oxytocin. Oxytocin has also been linked to child-dog interactions and even to the frequency of pats. Why aren't the kids getting the same response from friendly adults? Because other adults are fractals of parents. If our body (not our minds) doesn’t trust our parents, we struggle to trust all humans. That’s why adults who were insecurely attached to their parents as infants decades later show much higher levels of jealousy with their partners. Dogs, on the other hand, shower us with oxytocin and unconditional love. What is oxytocin a proxy for? Endorphins. What do endorphins do? They generate the self-other blur where two become one. What gates that? Personal distress scores. Until we gain the cultural strength to recognise that children are mirrors unto us, that their undesirable behaviour is a by-product of physiological separation, we will never solve the youth anxiety crisis. Until then, animals, as they always have, provide a temporary safety net.

2. The second most shared video touched upon the most swept under the rug data we have to heal ourselves: inflammation. PGE2 levels are positively associated with sensory sensitivity, social avoidance, hyperactivity, repetitive behaviour and impulsivity. Where have we seen that behaviour before? Of course, ADHD/ASD. We shouldn’t be surprised to hear there are sky-high levels in those conditions. What drops those levels? Yoga, by 70%. Some further context to the 1/3 drop in ADHD symptoms from the yoga intervention for kindergarten children we talked about last week. What raises PGE2 levels? An interesting example is COVID (especially long COVID). So that big spike in ADHD/ASD diagnoses we experienced wasn’t a blossoming of healthy variations, as we were all locked up. It was our bodies on fire. Did we recognise that? No, of course not, because we ejected the cultural thumbdrive. Instead of helping people down the defense cascade, we encouraged acronyms on bios and promoted asking strangers to like us. One prevents our healing because symptom reductions no longer become a target, and the second exports our sovereignty to people we can’t control. Not behaviours of a species in a state of abundance.

3. The most shared video was one recounting the earliest known reference to autistic behaviour in history. It is believed to be medical notes from the Sui dynasty in China, and this behaviour was directly linked to maternal prenatal distress. We knew 1,500 years ago, as we know today. There is a dose-dependent relationship between maternal prenatal stress and both ADHD and ASD risks. Why don’t we speak of it? Because we don’t prioritise downregulation, and we have forgotten how to downregulate in the first place. Normal outcomes when we believe that our health is individual and cognitive rather than collective and body-led.

Next up, work in progress.

What’s a common question we get at therapy? Perhaps something such as: what is one thing you could do for yourself next week that may support you? What would that do? It would reduce delta brain waves. What increases delta waves? Expressing gratitude and feeling out emotions in our body. Why do we want delta waves? Because they help clean our brains of toxins. Who is most clogged with toxins? People diagnosed with ADHD/ASD. Which means we already have the answer to what we should do. Practice loving-kindness meditations and don’t try to outthink a feeling.

Which brings us to our monday meditation. This week, we are focusing on sensory rebalancing. In our modern world, we significantly overallocate our credits to visual attention. We have more senses, and when we forget to use them, we tend to start relating to ourselves via external people and stimuli, not what we feel inside. This plays a big part in our disemobiment. By returning to our senses, and doing so in relation to what arises within, rather than to us, we start to build a safe harbour to return to in the body, rather than relying on distraction/control/soothing to overcome each momentary departure from homeostasis.

I’ll leave it there for now, wishing you success for the week ahead and, as always, here’s to your healing 💙,

Jas