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

Read more

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

Read more

Read more

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

Read more

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

Read more

Happy Easter. I hope you have been able to carve out time to come together with loved ones and some time to reflect on how personal sacrifice walks hand in hand with our ability to give and receive love.

A little round-up of this week in body-led healing.

We’ve launched the Somatic Academy. It is pleasing to see not only sign-ups but also course progress rates, keep at it!

Along with the academy, there is the material backbone: The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was trying to Save You?

Monday meditation focused on alternate nostril breathing, a great technique to rebalance our inter-hemispheric connectivity. Such connectivity has been found to break down in PTSD and be impaired in those with poor memory consolidation more generally.

Lastly, the 3 most shared pieces of content (naturally, clips drawn from the Somatic Academy):

1. Transferring gut bacteria from humans with ADHD into mice leads to deleterious effects on the rodents’ hippocampus, an area of the brain described as our ‘personality mediator.’

   

2. Designing the shy child. What might be revealed if, instead of pushing children who seem to be living inside their shell off a cliff and hoping they enjoy it, we asked, why does the body deem it necessary to build a shell in the first place? Here, we find that cortisol levels at 15 weeks of pregnancy predict amygdala volume in children at 7 years, and those amygdala volumes are inversely associated with extraversion scores.

   

3. People with ADHD experience increased connectivity between the amygdala and reward areas of the brain, a circumstance that makes waiting, i.e. momentarily forgoing a perceived reward, as threatening in the brain as what is experienced in healthy controls by fear-eliciting negative stimuli.

I’ll leave it there for now.

To your healing 💙,

Jas

Read more

Been a while between drinks, I do hope your start to the year has been smooth :)

Last year was quite the whirlwind with 5 books written, and their consolidation into ‘Who Brought You Here.’ A ride that delivers us to today.

This project has always been one focused on working, listening and refining with the same goal under the big umbrella of healing. For those who have been with me since the start, you have seen the evolution from candid relays of my own therapy journey way back when with ‘Thursday Therapy’ notes, that morphed into podcasts (1), (2), and (3), that morphed into weekend retreats and finally the book offerings.

What has become, surprisingly, unavoidably apparent is that the area of highest demand is frontline defenders. My work was always focused on the patient side. That surely other people out there were just as frustrated as I with the magic beans or cognitive approaches to complex human problems. Approaches that silo observations into labels often lead to a subscription and highlight our species' lack of understanding of the truth that lies beneath.

I’ve been familiar with this my entire life. As a kid, I would go to sleep hooked up to a ventilator machine. My eyes would water as a stress response when I was in front of people I didn’t know. I was taken to a hearing specialist because the teacher at school thought I was deaf, because I didn’t speak. Doctors suggested I could surgically remove my sweat glands because of the dinner plate-sized sweat marks on my school shirts. At each step, a new label, some more medication, and a larger suitcase of: “I guess it’s just me.”

Anyway, I subconsciously ‘masked up’, worked hard, ticked all the right boxes, got into the corporate world, only for it all to fall down around me. Burnout, panic attacks and an inability to even take out the garbage from my house for fear of other people. A scenario that surprised me, my loved ones, and, sadly, someone with an eight-year degree.

I went to the psychologist, and there, I was told that maybe medication could be a good idea, and in a gesture not too long after those words, I was handed a piece of paper that said, ‘Catastrophizing: What is it?’ with a little cartoon character running around making a big deal out of small moments. I never felt so small. I never felt so misunderstood. I never felt so hopeless.

Fast forward three years, and I was back in the exact same position, fast forward three years, and exact same again. All along the way, all I was given were cognitive tools and prescriptions that I didn’t respond to. Then came my somatic Teacher, and the cycle finally broke, which brings us back to Therapy Thursday, because those successes were also what other people were keen to hear.

Since the book launched last year, however, the biggest requests have been for training. Every alphabet soup acronym you could imagine is attached to email signatures. What I have since realised is that there are an enormous number of practitioners who are well aware of the ineffectiveness of the software they were loaded with, particularly once you move past fight/flight.

What has been of particular interest is the intersection of life experience with [insert label of condition], how body-led approaches found success, and also, why. That last part is important because we live in low-trust times today. We have a very high burden of proof to believe anything, I know, I’m one of those people with that elevated threshold.

Incidentally, from my need to know ‘why’ the somatic tools work, as an always-journaler, I would make copious notes and follow up with extensive research into where replication has been carried out elsewhere. Those notes have come in handy.

So we have a rare opportunity to experience the butterfly effect. Provide frontline defenders with complementary tools, along with the footnotes explaining why, and we appear to be in a cultural moment where real change can occur.

That said, I launched the ‘Somatic Academy’ today. The first module is live: The Defense Cascade - What if the Body Was Trying to Save You.’ Unsurprisingly, given what I mentioned above about my note-taking, a book is also available for independent digestion or as a course companion, with over 1,600 references.

That reference list is another reminder that there is no shortage of evidence for understanding how the body responds to adversity, holds adversity and resolves adversity. The problem is with us. We have a preconception that body-led approaches are a bit goo-goo-ga-ga for elephant-pants-wearing backpackers in Thailand or Ubud. Yet, it’s basically the opposite. Body-led approaches are easily observable, founded biologically, and far more effective than cognitive-only approaches. Whereas cognitive is often purely theoretical and has barely updated over the decades, despite the deluge of data that modern science has provided us.

A simple example to illustrate the point is panic disorder. We have compassion for the psychologist’s behaviour in handing me that piece of paper, because it was born of a belief. What belief? Well, read a textbook, and it will describe how cognitive interventions are designed to improve top-down activation of the DLPFC to dampen the amygdala and thus turn off excessive bottom-up responses that drive panic disorder.

But guess what? If you remove someone’s amygdala, they are more likely to have a panic attack than someone with a functioning amygdala, and the higher your DLPFC activation prior to CBT, the more likely you will not only receive no benefit from the intervention, but it will also increase your fear of bodily symptoms. What’s the DLPFC doing? It's carrying out a passive response that occurs in lock-step with patients’ lower feelings of safety in their bodies. All data that is not new, but has failed to filter from the species library to the front-line defenders. A failure, with any luck, this project will help to repair.

So the goal for this module, should it be of interest, involves a ride up the defense cascade from an intergenerational, epigenetic and cultural perspective with a continuous comparison of mass market and body-led approaches at each step of the way. Sprinkled in is lived experience, which will no doubt help practitioners understand what it is like to live within the skin of someone presenting separation anxiety, selective mutism, hyperhidrosis, agoraphobia, panic disorder, ADHD, ASD, c-PTSD, dissociation, etc., etc., etc so that we can pull together the thread of predictable responses to irrational demands, and find the nozzles of change, rather than simply building a personality prison that diagnosing and dispensing tends to result in.

Should any of this be of interest, I encourage you to visit the ‘Somatic Academy’ page.

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

If the book is more your style, or you’d like it as a study companion, it is now available on Amazon: USA, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Japan, Canada, Australia.

As always, to your healing 💙,

Jas

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more