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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

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Hope the weekend was well spent, and a big happy Mother’s Day to the parts of the world where yesterday honoured those who fulfilled the sacred role of bringing every single one of us to life. Here, here to mum.

Let’s wrap up the week that was, starting off with our top three shared videos, as always, excerpts from the Somatic Academy program: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’

In reverse order, we have the reminder that the sickest COVID patients in the ICU were men with high estrogen (and women with high testosterone, but that’s for another day).

COVID, of course, is not the topic of discussion. What we are reminded of is the role of sex hormones and our wellness. If we truly would like health and well-being, targeting age-adjusted fertility is one of the most powerful metrics available.

When men are stressed, their testosterone gets converted to estrogen rapidly due to estrogen’s role as an anti-inflammatory. Which is why estrogen in men is positively correlated with anxiety, depression and anger scores. The body is trying to save us from inflammation, help us recognise the unsustainability of our situation with sadness, and ring-fence our experience with fear and anger.

The best part of this scenario, though, is that testosterone is bidirectional. Stress and inflammation reduce testosterone, but testosterone reduces stress and inflammation. Not only that, we will feel more connected, pro-social, and more likely to help others, because testosterone directly hits endogenous opioid receptors (endorphins).

But weren’t we told that testosterone = anger? That’s our cultural poverty at work again. Cortisol predicts anger across a man’s lifecycle. We don’t blame a sex hormone for what a stress hormone did. We need that body, like every other, to be downregulated and taken back to safety.

Next up, we have kindergarten kids with ADHD doing yoga. After just 12 weeks, hyperactivity decreased by 31%, and inattention decreased by 41%.

We receive another reminder, ADHD is not fate, it is not a healthy variation, it is not an authentic expression, it is a survival response. We can create it on a probability basis with an ingredient list that involves trauma, pollution, inflammation, insecure attachment, elevated personal distress scores and one or all of those can begin three generations ago.

The most shared video this week involved the passive defense response of falls in cortisol during trauma assessments in children with high early life adversity.

This video is, perhaps obviously, a passion point of mine. The software we embed in frontline defenders that spills into the minds of the wider public is relaxed or fight/flight. But the body is a lot smarter than that, and we have known it is a lot smarter than that, for a long time. It’s a shame that it has not filtered through to mass market approaches.

Sadly, by excluding a review of the circumstances of someone in their body (in this case, children), we don’t recognise that even our rescue attempts can be re-traumatising. This is also not confined to a minor percentage of the population.

For example, one-third of PTSD patients oscillate between shutdown and hyperarousal in a single session. For example, PTSD patients and panic patients often experience falling cortisol and rising norepinephrine under stress conditions, whilst healthy controls do not. That SAM/HPA ratio is a quick proxy for shutting down our cognitive lights that will only be turned back on when our body (not our mind) perceives it is safe to do so.

Moving on to this week’s Monday meditation with its focus on forgiveness. Why compassionate meditation works so well is not because we allow ourselves to be human; it’s because we allow everyone to be human. We assume ignorance before malice, we assume suffering before wisdom. In that way, we can work towards alleviating some of the common emotions that rise up when we have been wronged, such as shame and guilt.

Why do we feel shame and guilt when we are the injured party? Because if we were ‘enough,’ other people would either not see us as hurtable, or help prevent us from being hurt. Because if we were ‘enough,’ we would be able to save ourselves from being hurt in the first place. Naturally, all arrive at the same destination of a low sense of self-worth, something within our realm of influence.

Regarding work in progress, a very interesting study found that practising breathing at 6 breaths per minute increased the volume of the left OFC region of the brain.

Who has a smaller left OFC? People diagnosed with ADHD, and especially people diagnosed with ADHD and ODD.

Why do we have a smaller left OFC? Because of epigenetic (gene x environment) changes to our oxytocin receptors, which walk side by side with our insecure attachment.

Yes, once again, we arrive at the same point we always will: what if the root of our suffering was our separation? Why don’t we talk about this? Because as a culture we have decided to pretend that we are isolated DNA blobs accidentally running into each other, which is not only factually incorrect but also makes us all unhappy. When we put up our hand, or the hand of a loved one, for help, we are high-fived with a pack of magic beans. Terrible state of affairs, particularly given the knowledge we hold in the species library.

Lastly, we review the medal tally for May. In a surprising turn of events, we see a new entrant: Canada, eh? Close behind is the Deutschland, and coming up tail the USA. This week, the homeland of Australia falls away into ‘other,’ but that’s ok, we are used to that :)

🥇🇨🇦🥈🇩🇪🥉🇺🇸

Should you perceive the program to be helpful to your circumstances, there’s a button below that leads to more information.

Somatic Academy

I’ll leave it there for now.

As always, to your healing 💙,

Jas

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Hopefully your weekend was well spent. Personally, I got burnt for the first time this year, which, while obviously not something to do every day, is a sign the northern European sun has finally reconnected to a power socket.

Let’s get started with the review. The top three most shared videos of the week, all drawn from the Somatic Academy program: ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’ were:

1. If we check in on the volume of your DLPFC, a critical portion of our top-down control centre in the brain, then ask how involved your father was in your upbringing, the participants who answered ‘low father involvement’ had on average a 5% smaller DLPFC. What is the DLPFC volume associated with? It is 8% smaller in ADHD, and it is negatively correlated with impulsivity scores and positively correlated with GABA levels. What has Dad got to do with this? Our brain is formed, in part, due to neural synchrony. Our parents, in our presence, link up with us, growing areas deemed significant to copy/paste the prior generation’s responses. Smart right? But hang on, we still haven’t answered, what has Dad got to do with this? Answer: he lights up in the DLPFC when looking at his child, when his baby cries, when he plays with his child, and when he problem-solves with his child. Mum, on the other hand, lights up in the emotional area of the brain, which, when dad does, is inversely associated with oxytocin levels, and when mum lights up in the top-down region with her child, it predicts insecurity of attachment. Mum is embedded with the super skill of bottom-up regulation, and Dad is embedded with the super skill of top-down regulation. When Dad is not involved in our upbringing, we miss a critical step in our development. Is this fate? No, for example, Catholic nuns have a 28% larger DLPFC. We have plenty of tools to mould our brains, but currently our mass-market approaches tell us the state of our bodies is irrelevant, and our culture tells us ‘all a child needs is love’ while being unwilling to define what that means.

   

2. On a similar topic, the second-most-shared video featured findings from a study of adults aged 18-62, who, instead of ticking a box for low or high father involvement, ticked whether their parents were divorced or not divorced. Those who ticked ‘divorced’ had on average 2/3 lower oxytocin. Remember, oxytocin is a proxy for endogenous opioids, and separate studies have shown evidence of a near halving of endogenous opioid expression in adults who report parental separation. This is also what we see from trauma and unresolved loss events. Endogenous opioids are negatively correlated with attachment security, emotional suffering scores, anxiety symptoms, depression symptoms, autism symptoms and are what ADHD medication increases almost as much as cocaine. The mantra comes to our mind once again: what if the root of our suffering was our separation?

   

3. The third video, which continued the theme of ‘topics that make us feel uncomfortable but are critical for our species survival,’ was an illuminating study on cortisol synchrony between mothers and their infants. While oxytocin and cortisol synchrony between parents and children is well known, in this instance, the synchrony travelled across time and space. Mothers engaged in a positive or negative conversation, then played with their child, then the child faced a challenge. The infant's cortisol levels were a carbon copy of mum’s cortisol levels during her positive or negative conversation, but in a different room at a different time. Once again, until we recognise that children are mirrors unto us, we are unlikely to overcome the cultural poverty that loops behaviour into personalities, personalities into diagnosis and diagnosis being met with dispensary. Do we prioritise safety in the body? Or do we prefer to outsource the consequences of our non-safety to others? When that other is us, will mass market attempts meet us with confusion as to why we are in such a state, or compassionately meet our circumstances so that we can break the intergenerational cycles? It’s up to us.

So what can we do to become the agents of our own rescue? Picking up the anterior insula region of the brain may help us, because

• Activation is negatively correlated with loneliness scores.

• Activation is negatively correlated with ADHD symptom severity.

• It is almost turned off in autism.

What is this region of the brain associated with? Trust. Which is simply another example that the conditions we were told were healthy variations, however, ones we only received a diagnosis for by successfully ticking deficit boxes, is, at least in part, a separation problem.

Should we wish to turn back on this region, what options do we have? One very low-hanging fruit is loving kindness meditation (which we frequently practice in our Monday Meditations). Novice practitioners who achieved a high compassionate state were able to activate this area of the brain, whereas experienced practitioners had a higher baseline and also showed greater activation during high compassionate states.

In other words, when your grandparents said prayers with your parents when they were children, such as:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Before asking for God’s blessings for relatives, friends, and family pets, this was a very similar exercise.

From this perspective, we begin to see that non-affiliation is a worldview. It doesn’t mean we have to all become affiliated, but it does mean that many of the support structures that were building our brains have been removed, and we would likely benefit from recognising that and asking ourselves what we will replace them with.

Looking forward, this week’s Monday Meditation is an exercise in somatic unification of emotional experience.

What does that word salady mean? In short, it's the famous question: ‘Where do you feel that in the body?’ In long, it is identifying that energy (not hoobeegoobee magic, but unfinished survival responses) resides in the body at predictable locations that align with a predictable set of emotions.

When we start to understand that our body is trying to save us, and that emotions are calling cards for that desire, this exercise helps fill the gap with the physical movement desired from our body, which is trying to save us, with an arising of emotion, to meet a moment.

Practising this helps us not only free ourselves from being hostage to our emotions, but also builds a container for somatic reintegration events. I’ve shared a particularly powerful example in my own healing journey where my hand pulled tightly into a fist unprompted, which was a reflex of my body trying to pull the brake on the motorbike of my mate, who was tragically killed in an accident with an intoxicated driver.

Cognitive approaches will call that irrational, whilst at the same time handing out magic beans that are also used as an alternative to chemical castration in prisons, and call that rational. Surely we can do better.

Lastly, this week marks the one-month anniversary of the Somatic Academy launch. Overwhelmed with the response in such a short period of time, and so pleased that there are people, particularly front-line defenders, who are thirsty for an upgrade to our species software for how we meet disorganised states.

I’ll leave it there for now.

As always, to your healing 💙,

Jas

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Hope you’ve managed to enjoy yourself this weekend. Personally, I’m still on quite a high after George Pittar came away with a win at the Margaret River event for the World Surfing League. Incredible talent.

Let’s start the review this week with the work on program two. I thought I would share a couple of charts. The first reminds us that when we talk about GABA (our primary inhibitory neurotransmitter), there is always a counterparty in glutamate (our primary excitatory neurotransmitter). When that balance is disrupted, peace is likely quite far away from us.

What conditions are associated with high glutamate? Almost all. Depression, OCD, PTSD, autism, ADHD, but fascinatingly, it is what differentiates persistent ADHD from ADHD that we grow out of.

This, of course, reminds us of step 1 in a body-led approach: safety. If we have not met ourselves in a downregulated state, why is that? Do we have a toolkit to take ourselves to calm? Are we prioritising the necessity to do so? The answers to both of those questions culturally skew us towards no and no, because our default mode today is hypervigilance. That being the case, we use words such as ‘can’t’ which is a terribly sad construction of a great ceiling over our experience.

Complementary to this predicament, this week’s Monday meditation takes us through a somatic shake-out.

A useful tool when we find ourselves halfway (or more) up The Defense Cascade. For example, people diagnosed with panic disorder often find meditation difficult, and the science backs that up. While healthy controls show increases in BDNF (a protein that is a near necessity to extinguish our fears), panic patients actually show declines. Why? Because we require re-mobilisation (we are in a passive defensive response). Stopping can provide a gap for survival responses to escape into that we are yet unable to contain. Personally, I’ve experienced panic attacks in the past while trying to do yoga. That was not what the body was asking for.

So we get familiar with our location on the Defense Cascade, and we regain our sovereignty over our energetic experience by accessing a broad toolkit of arousal management. Perhaps today the best tool is a shakeout, perhaps tomorrow is some deep breathing, perhaps the next day it is really stretching out our time in shavasana. That’s having a mature relationship with a bodily vessel.

Moving on to the top three shared videos this week, all clips from program one of the Somatic Academy, ‘The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?’

1. First up is swapping self-compassion for self-esteem when we are targeting stability of self-worth. Self-esteem is relative. Relative to what? Other people. This evolutionarily is quite intelligent. 150 people in a village, I feel a little crappy about my behaviour, I chop off the aversive parts of myself and social cohesion is maintained. When there are 8 billion people, this approval process is severely corrupted. So we bring home the judgment, and we practice self-compassion. This has been shown to be far more strongly associated with self-worth and is naturally related to our capacity to show compassion to others.

   

2. Next up, we touched on the manufacture of a people-pleasing perfectionist. If we were aliens playing with human DNA, the easiest way to create a person who would behave in such a way is to make them insecurely attached to their parents; then the games begin. That child becomes an adolescent, who becomes an adult, constantly tying their internal state to the outcome of others they can’t control. This, of course, builds the case for burnout, because we are waiting subconsciously for that tap on the shoulder that says: “You did it, you are enough, you can rest now.” That of course never comes, and so once again, we have to adopt ourselves. We start investigating, in a state of downregulation, who we are when we are not trying to validate ourselves through the assumptions of what other people may or may not like in us.

   

3. Thirdly, we have sensory processing in autism. Unfortunately, what makes social engagement both overwhelming in the moment, and time-consuming to overcome the exhaustion afterwards, is the absorption and digestion of sensory stimuli independently, i.e., eyes, ears, touch… Instead of a coherent picture, fragmentation exists, and this is yet another example that is shared with trauma, PTSD patients do exactly the same. What increases the severity of this? Glutamate levels.

Over to the Somatic Academy, where I’m very pleased to say we had the biggest week yet. Warm welcome to all new participants, certainly hope the offering serves you well :)

Somatic Academy

Regarding the podium finishes, Germany retains top spot, while the US has squeezed itself into a tie for second with Australia.

🥇🇩🇪 🥈🇺🇸🥈 🇦🇺

Alrighty, I’ll leave it there for now. Have a great start to the week.

As always, to your healing 💙,

Jas

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How time flies, can you believe we are into the second quarter of the year? I hope that you are well on your way towards your 2026 goals, or if you haven’t asked what they are yet, you are able to carve out some time to set a north star.

What follows is a little round-up of the week that was.

Ground has been broken on program two of the Somatic Academy, a reminder of the project at large:

1. Program 1 is up the defense cascade, understanding how our intelligent body continues to try to save us at every turn, which includes the ability to start our experience with several survival responses in each hand based on the lives of those who came before us.

2. Program 2 is down the defense cascade, learning how to take the body to safety and whilst there, release the debris of trauma. Working title is ‘They Abandoned Themselves.’

3. Program 3 is drafted as ‘a fragile elevation,’ helping overcome our current cultural poverty of believing humans are on escalator rides towards their highest expression via coming to terms with how humans are built from the ground up by their parents. From there, we can more effectively adopt ourselves, replace the missing parts, and help reset the stepping off point for the next generation.

Regarding program two, the current work in progress, I thought I would share this graph below. What does it show? The percentage of the sample that suffered from intestinal permeability. That sample was separated into healthy controls, those diagnosed with autism (who had a 7 times higher rate), but in the middle, what do we find? First-degree relatives. A chart that looks very similar to our ‘fear of bodily symptoms’ chart in first-degree relatives of panic disorder patients within program 1.

What does that hint towards? Firstly, we have a gut problem, sure. But again and again it shows us, our mental health is far more likely to not be individual and cognitive, it is far more likely to be collective and body-led. The behaviour we don’t enjoy ourselves, and the behaviour we don’t enjoy in others, is, at least in part, due to our bodily vessels having gaping holes in the hull. What do we do with those gaping holes today? We try to out-think them. When that obviously doesn’t work as the water continues to gush in, what do we do? We paper over the cracks with magic beans, which don’t work either, as represented by the fact that we have to keep taking them.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, I welcome you to check out the Somatic Academy page:

Somatic Academy

As usual, let’s pick out the three most shared pieces of content, all drawn from The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You?

1. The most shared video this week was the finding that two-month-old infants’ temperament, particularly the expression of fear, can be predicted by the cortisol levels in their mothers' breast milk. Then we do what is uncommon today, and ask: what predicts that cortisol in breast milk? Answer: A mother’s early life adversity. Not included in the video, but important to note, is that fear responses in infancy predict later separation anxiety diagnosis by age 8. What is negatively associated with separation anxiety in children? Oxytocin levels. What are mum’s oxytocin levels if a child is diagnosed with separation anxiety? Up to 60% lower. What predicts a child’s oxytocin levels? Their parents’ oxytocin levels. What if the root of our suffering was our separation? If we acknowledged that, how could we collectively agree to meet disorganised states?

2. The second most shared video related to the inverse association between GABA levels and ADHD, ASD and sensory sensitivity. It may surprise many to hear that GABA actually starts its life as excitatory. What turns it inhibitory is the same as what helps produce it to start with, oxytocin. That’s right, we arrive vigilant, and after copious cues of safety presented from our parents (mum’s affectionate touch and dad’s stimulatory play), our GABA pathway turns inhibitory, and ramps up production. We observe that as calm, centred humans. We observe the opposite as the disruption of the excitatory/inhibitory balance, poor signal over noise discrimination, and sensory sensitivity. All of which we naturally find in PTSD as well.

3. The third most shared video touched on the uncomfortable truth that if we had a goal to create an ADHD child, a highly effective way to bring that about would be to make sure that our partner and we were heroin addicts, because that leads to a 80% chance of ADHD in the next generation. Yes, ADHD is a natural by-product of the near destruction of the endogenous opioid system. What does ADHD medication do? It increases endogenous opioid receptor expression almost as much as cocaine. In comes the same metaphor as before. As a species, we see a hole in the hull, we plug it with magic beans, instead of thanking the body for trying to save us, giving us cues of where to go (safety), and self-repairing once we get there.

As for Monday meditation, we touched on epigenetic changes that correlate with feelings of ‘parental rejection’ and posed the question in a state of downregulation: what would becoming curious about adopting ourselves look and feel like?

Over to our country rankings, Germany takes an even stronger lead, while Australia and the US are this week being squashed by the collective effort of all other nations, which, from past experience, is likely Canada and the UK. So thank you to all, and I sincerely wish the Defense Cascade program is serving you well.

🥇🇩🇪 🥈🇦🇺🥉 🇺🇸

I’ll leave it there for now.

As always, to your healing 💙,

Jas

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Spring is springing in the northern hemisphere; it has been lovely to absorb some real vitamin D for the first time in months. I hope you have been able to catch some light in some way, shape, or form where you are in the world :)

A little round-up from the week that was, starting with the three most shared pieces of content, once again all drawn from The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was trying to Save You? within the Somatic Academy:

1. The most shared clip regarded findings from flipping the script. Instead of what we usually do, look at children, observe undesirable behaviour, loop it into labels, and then hand out the magic beans, researchers asked: What if we sent parents to therapy instead? After doing so, not only did parent stress scores go down, but there was a 2-for-1 on offer. Every 1% drop in parent stress decreased ADHD symptoms in children by 2%. A reminder, the children didn’t have to do anything. It’s this type of data that, with resilience, should inspire us. We recognise we are intelligently designed to participate in each other’s nervous systems, and children simply arrive as mirrors unto our organisation/disorganisation. If we said: thank you, they could guide us towards our highest expression. If we say: no, thank you, we continue on the merry-go-round of intergenerational trauma.

2. The second most shared clip was that relating to the unfortunate reality that people suffering from chronic pain conditions, in this case, fibromyalgia, report uncomfortably high levels of parentification in their youth. Incredibly also, the severity of their pain was related to their beliefs around self-silencing. What predicts our levels of self-silencing? The answer to the question: How responsible did you feel for your mother’s/father’s happiness? We remind ourselves that at that moment, we do not export our sovereignty to another person now we are an adult, we don’t look at our partners, our friends, or random strangers and ask them to listen to our grievances. Why? Because authenticity scores are gated by emotional regulation. Which is to say that emotions are a vehicle, not a destination. We commit to re-parenting/adopting ourselves, and the best way to do that, from a data-backed perspective, is to take the body to calm.

3. The third most shared clip related to inflammation, an area that provides an enormous opportunity for turning down the nozzle of symptom severity of basically any diagnosis we have, but in this case: ADHD, ASD and the sub-category of sensory sensitivity. While it is important to note that specific inflammatory markers related to symptom severity in both ADHD and ASD, one in particular does a lot of heavy lifting: PGE2. This, when released, tends to not only recruit a whole number of other inflammatory players, but jumps around our body priming our sensory neurons and even heads up to the area of the brain responsibile for panic attacks, lowering the threshold for when to pull the lever.

This week’s Monday meditation involved, amongst other things, reflecting on the question: what is executive function dependent on? We enter into disorganised states, we put our hand up for help, we head into the office where the lifeguard of our species sits, and we try to straighten the thought noodles that appear to be causing us distress. However, we do not ask frequently enough: what rationality am I expecting from a body in a state of irrationality?

For example, norepinephrine is heavily related to emotional distancing and the freeze response. If we open the drawers of disempowering outcomes, and that triggers more norepinephrine, we can often leave feeling worse than we came in. Mass market approaches will then slap a label on us such as: Treatment Resistant, and conclude that the only hope is magic beans. Yet, if we accidentally walked into yoga studio nextdoor, carried out some breathwork, emotional suppression and depression scores drop significantly. Why? Because norepinephrine is coupled with respiration. We aren’t treatment resistant; we were using tweezers to change a wheel instead of a wrench. It’s the tool, not the tyre.

Lastly, over to the program, Germany takes pole position two weeks into April, dankeschön.

🥇🇩🇪 🥈🇦🇺🥉 🇺🇸

I’ll leave it there for now.

As always, to your healing 💙,

Jas

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