How To Regulate Your Nervous System For Stress, Anxiety, And Trauma | Peter Levine

27:31So again, you just gently kind of lead the person to the body from wherever they are. You know, I was asked to see this young man who was on the spectrum, on the autistic spectrum. He lived up in the Bay Area. So he would come down for four days, you know, once a year. So when he first came down, he had his computer and he wanted me to have my computer and he would email me and then I would respond with my computer. So it was almost impossible for him to actually be with another human being with contact. Well, the second year, pretty much the same. Then the third year, he opened his computer and then closed it.

28:19And he started to talk. And then the fourth year, he had met this young lady, a very lovely young lady. And then they got married. and now every Christmas, New Year's, they send me a wonderful family picture of their child. That was, I think it's four or five year old child. And so it was about meeting him where he was, starting computer to computer because that was where his comfort level is. And then gradually bringing him and people in general to some reference to the body when something excites them, when something turns them on. So is that relatively clear? I mean, I love that story. I guess I still don't quite understand the mechanism by which connecting with your bodily sensations will help you move trauma through.

29:11How exactly does that work? But remember, trauma is what's locked in the body. Again, that example, we go out and we see that injured person and our bodies go yuck. And if it's severe enough, our bodies stay yuck. and our bodies continue to talk to the brain and saying, this is bad. And then the brain says, it must be bad and gets even more contracting in the body. So I think really the key is because it's locked in the body. It's only by connecting to the body that we can unlock it or it's mainly the body. There's another thing that I think is useful is that there's been a lot of research coming out lately about interception.

29:55And interception is the body sense. And in a number of these research studies, they said if the person can become just, not even like things like you were becoming aware of, but just their heartbeat, that it greatly changes, improve their mental health and their physical health. One small thing. So I think this is a field now which is beginning to blossom about interception. And you could say that this interception is approach, the way I use it, is in healing the wounds of trauma and betrayal. Yeah, so just to state that back to you, the enzymatic experiencing through techniques like breathing and vocalizing or working with your shoulders or your posture or...

30:44Or anywhere in the body that's being held. Yes, you're getting us in touch with where tension trauma is being held so that it can move through. Exactly. You said it better than I've been saying it. Really. What does all this have to do with the evolutionarily wired fight, flight, freeze response that we have and that all animals have? Yes, that's right. Well, again, our response to threat or danger generally is the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight that mobilizes us for action. but then when we're feeling overwhelmed or when you know with the COVID people had such fear of the COVID but it's not something they could see and it's not something they could flee from so the one thing that they can do is shut down in the body and this is my theory and I've worked with a number of people so I don't want to say that this is a proven fact but I've worked with the number of people who have had this post-COVID, long COVID, and their body has stayed shut down.

31:52And then when we're gradually able to help them move out of shutdown, then some of the chronic fatigue becomes less, in some cases considerably less. So again, if we're in fight or flight, we're mobilized for action. If we're overwhelmed and we're shut down with freeze and collapse, then that cuts us off from connection. Well, connection to ourselves, our bodies, but connection to others. Because when you're either expecting danger, you're not gonna wanna engage with a person, especially if you're in a state of shutdown. You just wanna get through the day. But then if it stays stuck, then we have to work and see where it's become stuck and then move out of it.

32:41And then sometimes say an acknowledgement or as you did, it's like an affirmation where you said, I'm alive. I'm alive and I'm real. I'm alive and I'm present. Because again, that's a recognition of the importance of what happens when we begin to connect with our bodies. That we feel more present. We feel more alive. We feel more grounded. We feel more centered. And there really is no greater reward. At least that's how I see it. Coming up, Peter A. Levine talks about SE practices we can right now implement in our own lives, how to move through ancient wounds, whether you have trauma or not, the research behind SE and his personal experience of trauma and how he worked through it.

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36:24if i'm listening to this and i'm intrigued you know some listeners may not have access at least not immediately to a somatic experiencing therapist what are some practices we can take that we could put into our lives immediately and and maybe you've already listed them and demonstrated them already but i want to pose that question to you anyway i mean many people meditate. That's become more and more common. But what if you, instead of meditating on your thoughts, which is what most meditation is, about if you meditate also on your body. You know, I was invited to Thich Nhat Hanh Center in Plum Village, it's a meditation center.

37:10and one of the things that I really had sympathica with is that most of his meditation especially until people really became proficient at this was what they call walking meditation so when you're walking you naturally connect with your body they would do those kind of meditations walking meditations and then they would meet in groups of 12 or 15 underneath the plum tree and they would share with each other, remember the social engagement system, what they were experiencing, what they were learning, how they were relating to their bodies. So again, if you're doing meditation, also try to do walking meditation and feel how your body moves in space and time.

37:58And that alone, that re-inhabiting of our container, even without therapy per se, could that help us move through our ancient wounds? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think bottom line is we'll enrich our lives. And why not do something that enriches our lives, whether we have major trauma or not. I mean, truly, there are not many people that haven't had some wounds. I mean, the word for trauma in Greek is wound. And then the word for wound in old German is trauma or dream. So to really find ways to enrich our lives, to stimulate our dream talk, our dream world, our dream body. You know, I suggest to people that they write down dreams and because often dreams are taking us in the next direction.

38:59When I have a dream, I will actually, what I will try to do is look at pieces of the dream, parts of the dream, and then with my awareness go from the dream to what I'm experiencing in my body. So using the dream as a way to come into the body, maybe could even be called the dream body. So again, there are so many things that are enriched by body sensing, by body awareness, by interceptive awareness, that it makes sense for everybody to practice this. And as I said, the one example of just the study with just having a person become aware of their heartbeat, I mean, without feeling their pulse, but just hearing their heartbeat, that makes a significant difference in their well-being.

39:51Just doing that. So it's something that maybe I'm being repetitious, but it can enrich all of our lives, any of our lives. And it is, I believe, the royal route in working with the effect of trauma, particularly trauma that's been on the body. Actually, one of the people who wrote the endorsements for the book, a man named Bessel van der Kolk, he said nicely, Peter is a wise and kind pioneer of somatic therapies who has been a beacon for clinicians all over the world for understanding and dealing with the physical imprints of traumatic stress. And he wrote a book called The Body Keeps the Score.

40:32What we're seeing is, again, this used to be fringe, Dan. And when I talked about this to audiences back in the 60s and 70s, I really received basically a hostility. How could I say something so outlandish? And it was probably dangerous to have people become aware of their bodies. But that's not that way anymore. I think really at this point, it's no longer fringe. with research and with different ways of connecting to our experience. I think it's now clearly a part of maybe not completely in the mainstream, but largely now in the mainstream. I imagine somatic experiencing has been studied quite a bit.

41:21Could you give us a sense of what the research indicates? Yeah. Well, I mean, there are different kinds of research. The research that I mentioned initially, which was a study that was carried out, I think it was in Israel actually, where there was a lot of trauma. And it would just really look at the metrics for trauma. So there are different scales that you can use to measure trauma. And just doing, I think it was like, I believe it was like six sessions that they dramatically dropped the level of trauma. And this lasted for, I think, follow up at six months, if I'm correct. So that's what you want to do.

42:05This is basically an outcome study. We've done some physiological studies of what happens when people are in different states. We've done a little bit of that. We've done research on applying it to different situations, for example, for marriage and family work. Oh, and work with children, particularly first aid, because children are always going to have their accidents, especially once they're two years old. They can get into all kinds of trouble. You know, they're out on their skateboards or whatever, and they can get hurt and they can get scared. This may be swallowing marbles and then being rushed to the emergency room.

42:47So if the parents are able to be there with the child and support the child, be there by the child's side, maybe asking the child if it's okay for you to put your hand on their back. And then the kinds of reactions that you were just describing, Dan, that's what the children often describe. So again, like I said, somatic experience is not just a therapy per se, but it's about how to multiply the effectiveness of many different approaches, many different kinds of therapies, including cognitive therapies. So it sounds like you're saying the more we can heal ourselves, get in touch with our own wounds, our own body, let it move through, we can become like nodes of healing in the larger world.

43:38Yes. And that would be my deepest hope, that when we heal from ourselves, we can also help others, people who are close to us. But I think ultimately we can also begin to heal people who are further and further out in the world. And my God, if the world has never ever needed healing, it certainly needs it now. You know, I was doing a training many years ago, It must have been at least 20 years ago in Israel. At that time, it was possible to also have Palestinian therapists come. And so somebody asked me the question, well, what if you don't know what your trauma is? Can you still work with it?

44:28And I said, yes, you just need to have some symptom. It could be pain. It could be some haunting. But that's all you need. And so this man volunteered, a man named Chaim, And he was actually one of the pioneers of developing psychoanalytic therapy for Holocaust survivors. So he said that he'd been having back pains for 30 years. So it's interesting that he mentioned specifically 30 years. Because that means he, in some way, his unconscious, preconscious knows something. Subconscious knows something is going on 30 years ago. So when I start working with him, after a while, his body would go into waves.

45:10His fingers would become ice cold. Then they would become warm. Then he would be able to take full, easy breaths. And then rhythmically, full, easy breaths would come and go. And finally, at the end, you could just see he was sweating so deeply that this shock had been discharged. And the reason we later found out is when he was an army doctor, and his battalion was ambushed. Everyone died, but he fell out of the truck backwards into a ditch on his back. And so the horror and terror got locked into the back in the form of pain, physical pain. So, you know, I could see people were deeply moved.

45:52So I asked if anybody wanted to share something, if Chaim was okay with it, what they were noticing in their own experience, in their own bodies. And this one woman stood up after a while, elegant woman. She was from Gaza Mental Health. And she said, Chaim, when you came up to work with Dr. Levine, I was praying that something bad would happen to you, that you would be traumatized, that you would be, because you, your people have traumatized my people, have humiliated my people, have killed my people. But something happened when I started to feel in my body something about what you were maybe feeling in your body.

46:38And I realized, Chaim, until we find peace within ourselves, within our bodies, we'll never find peace with each other. And I don't want to make this sound like a panacea, but I think this is an important thing to cultivate, to be able to know that when we're reactive, it's probably because there's some trauma that's being reactivated or activated. So how to work with those and how to use that to heal to our families, to our children, our families, to our communities, and even maybe even to our countries. I mean, my God, right now, you know, our country could use a dose of healing. itself. Very true.

47:26You described earlier that trauma is, when we're traumatized, often we dissociate because, and it makes sense, we're trying to escape the experience. Many people who are carrying trauma with them now really resist and find terrifying the notion of reoccupying the body with good reason. What do you say to folks like that who hear about somatic experiencing and say, oh, this sounds horrifying. Yeah. When people first connect with their bodies, they may experience a contraction. But if the person is guided, and I describe, you know, quite a bit how it's guided to do it for myself, for my own healing in the book, you do feel worse for that moment.

48:09But if you're guided, this contraction will then move to an expansion. We start to connect with the traumatic sensations, which we dissociated from. So we start feeling contraction in our bodies. But then when we're guided, we feel an expansion and then another contraction and then another expansion and another contraction and another expansion. So in somatic experiencing, we never take the person right into the trauma. It's not like an exposure therapy, because that can be re-traumatizing. But I call this titration. We just touch into those sensations and move from contraction to experience. I call that pendulation, like the movement of a pendulum.

48:57Contraction, expansion, contraction, expansion. So yes, it can be frightening at first, but a therapist who knows what they're doing is able to take the person through that fear and into greater connection and greater expansion. You mentioned your childhood traumas and you write about them in your new book, An Autobiography of Trauma. Particularly, you tell a pretty horrifying and very violent story from your own childhood. Are you comfortable discussing that here? I won't say I'm 100 % comfortable, but yes, I'm open to sharing it. But I want to preface this. In somatic experience, like I just said, we don't go right into the trauma.

49:44So when I was having these symptoms, which were basically from a violent attack and a rape, to keep my family from testifying against the mafia, so our whole family, our life was threatened. The therapist isn't going to take me directly into that. but I came to this following memory when I was four or five years old my parents came into my bedroom must have been in the middle of the night or early in the morning and they laid a train track underneath the bed all the way around in an oval into the room then back also again under the bed and then the train was going around the track. So when I awoke, I was just thrilled.

50:30And when I worked with what did it mean to feel thrilled, I could feel that in my body. I felt excited. I felt turned on. And I jumped out of bed and I ran to the transformer and I changed the speed and I made the horn go toot, toot. and that memory let me know that I was cared for and loved, even if it was only for a relatively short period of time. And one of the things that is characteristic of people who had just experienced even the smallest amount of love in their childhood, that these people will be okay, that with good therapy, they will be okay. And then my guide took me gradually into dealing with what led to the rape and how I was able to heal that.

51:29And I think when I decided to write the book, it was only for myself. It was really as a personal excavation. But a close friend of mine said, Peter, I think you really should publish this as a book. because it could help other people with their own traumas, with their own healing. And particularly, you know, with telling their own stories. But it was too personal. It was too raw. And I was really afraid to do it. And she really encouraged me. And she said, Peter, maybe just think about it. And I had the following dream. I'm standing by an open field. and in my hand I have reams of paper and they're typewritten.

52:15So obviously it's some kind of a manuscript. But I don't know what to do with it in the dream. Then I look to the left, I look to the right and then in my indecision, this wind comes from behind me and takes the pages and scatters them into the meadow to land where they may. and that then said yes I'm going to tell the story and let it land where it may. Parts of it I think are inspiring, parts of it I think will be well will be valuable to people who have their own traumas or are interested in the nature of trauma because I use my story as a way of illustrating, not just talking theoretically, but about how I came to Chiron, Chiron in Greek mythology, and now we think of Chiron as the wounded healer, that as therapists, it's beholden to us to do our own healing.

53:18Because if we don't do our own healing, we're going to be limited in what guidance we can give to people who are coming to us for their healing. So again, I think this is part of important part of my life and important part, not the whole story, but important part of the autobiography of trauma, a healing journey. So anyhow, there were many, many different things in my life. Some were just exciting. Some were amazing. Some were almost incredible that they even happened, but enriching, enriching for me. And I believe will be enriching for the readers. Just to recap a little bit, when you were growing up, your dad ended up being called as a witness in a mafia trial.

54:04And then the mob tried to intimidate the family to convince your father not to testify. And as part of that, you were violently attacked in a nearby park, if I recall, and raped. That's right. And a park which had previously been a refuge for me. I would love to go there after I'd come home from school. I would drink my milk and mint and Pepperidge Farms mint cookies. And then I'd run into the park and go through the bushes down to a running track. And I would run and I'd feel the power in my legs, the strength in my legs. And that's where we started when we were going to go to the rape itself.

54:44So again, not all at once. But again, at one time when I was going down to the bushes, something was wrong. and there were these thugs wearing these Marlon Brando hats. And I knew something was wrong and the hair on my back was standing up. And then I was thrown to the ground. And again, they wanted my parents to know what happened to me so that that would intimidate them to not testify. But I didn't, I was too ashamed. because it's often what happens when people are traumatized. They have tremendous amount of shame. I was shamed to tell my parents about it. I hid it hidden from them. I actually kept it hidden from myself.

55:31And until I was able to follow these symptoms and be guided, they lay also out of my reach, but they were there haunting me, haunting me and then waiting for me to make this uncovering. Also, it was not just this event, but the milieu of, you know, because the mafia sent over their lawyer. And so we, my brothers and I knew something was terribly wrong, but it was never talked about. And finally, when it became talked about, well, it actually, it never really became talked about. It was just left in the back. And so that was an additional thing, because again, it's not just the trauma that happens to us.

56:18You know, what I say in An Unspoken Voice, one of my other books, is that trauma is not so much or not just what happens to us, but rather what we hold inside in the absence of that present empathetic other. And so my parents couldn't be that for me. Because again, they were under such a struggle of how they would survive. At a time we were experiencing some degree of poverty because my father's business, his father's company went out of business. But again, all of these things can be healed. And the trauma itself, I mostly healed in one or two sessions. But the other things, the milieu takes more time.

57:05And at the beginning, we were talking about this as being the hard work miracle to really feel supported by others. And one of the things when people wrote their endorsements in the book, I was so deeply touched by those endorsements that I felt their support. And in a way, their support was coming to me belatedly from the support that I didn't have as a child. And when I talk about that, it does bring waves of sadness and joy and how deeply they supported me and how important their endorsement was in helping me really take that last part in healing. The somatic experiencing sessions where you worked on this trauma, what was that like?

57:56I mean, of course it was frightening, but my guide knew not to expose me to this all at once, to just touch into it. And also to go back and forth between, remember those positive images that I had of being cared about, of being loved, of shifting back and forth between those and the other traumatic images. So not just the trauma images, but shifting back and forth. That's an important aspect. You know, there are also other parts of this that were very important in my development. I don't know if we have time. Maybe I can briefly mention when I was developing somatic experiencing and also working on my doctoral dissertation, there was a restaurant.

58:45And if you think this is going to, what would four was going to sound, well, this is probably going to sound even more. I would go to my favorite restaurant, the beggar's banquet. The waitresses there, they knew me. They invited me in. I usually started my meal with a bowl of warm soup with French bread, crunchy on the outside, soft and moist on the inside. And I would have something that I was writing on and I worked when I was there. At one moment, I saw a shadow coming to the other side of the table. And I looked up and it was an image of Albert Einstein. And of course, I knew that it was an image that is what Carl Jung called, oh gosh, what did he call it?

59:33A type of imagery that's very real, that's eidetic. And that image is very important in our imaginary, that imaginary image. So of course, at one part, I knew I was imagining this. But at the same time, it seemed almost real. And I would ask the professor questions. And then he would ask me questions about my questions, kind of the Socratic method. And this went on for a good period of almost about a year. Oh, act of imagination. That's what Jung called it. So again, the rational part of me knew that this was just an imaginative process, but that I could gain much from it. And so I could say went along with it.

1:00:21And it was something that I felt deeply moved every time we had this dialogue with us. So again, I figured this is something that simply is an imaginary image of active imagination. there was no reality to this except some 30 years ago 35 years ago I was visiting my parents who live in New York and I was coming back from spending the day at museums and I walked into the apartment in the Bronx and they were sitting on the sofa and I noticed in the bookshelf there was the theory of relativity by Einstein. So that provoked me to mention to my parents, especially to my mother, my experience with Einstein, my imaginary experience with Einstein.

1:01:15And my mother said, those weren't imaginary. And I said, what? She said, when I was pregnant, eight months pregnant with you. Your father and I were canoeing on this lake in New Jersey, and a wind squall came and tipped the canoe over. And we couldn't write the canoe, and we were certainly going to drown. And again, it would have been the end of my life as well, of course, before it started. But then a small sailboat came along, and there were two people in the sailboat, and they rescued my parents. One was an older man and the other one was a young woman. And they introduced themselves as Albert Einstein and his stepdaughter.

1:02:00And so my mother reasoned that because he saved my life in that moment of life threat, that somehow we would stay connected. I know this sounds totally weird. And sometimes it only recently when I have the courage to even talk about this because I would be afraid of people thinking I was weird. But I'm not afraid of that anymore. I think I've earned in getting this work out to literally 100 ,000 people or 75 ,000 people worldwide. It's out. Other people are sharing that burden. It's off my shoulders. And the question, have I done enough, which I try to address in the book, I can say yes, absolutely I've done enough because it's the on the shoulders of these other people these 60 people who are teaching semantics experiencing but the question am I enough I think that is a work in progress and that was really what I was trying to ascertain in uh in writing the book for myself was am I enough and what does that mean and what does it mean to me and what does it mean to others who are around me, who care about me and who I care about them.

1:03:18I find it fascinating that so many men of science, women of science, people of science have these metaphysical and mystical suspicions and convictions, really, that they're afraid to talk about until they can reach a degree of comfort that it can no longer destroy them. Yeah. Dan, thank you for that. Thank you for sharing that, for saying that. I appreciate that. I would imagine you're not alone. No, no, I don't think so. And again, if that really inspires other people to have those kinds of active imaginations, you know, sometimes as children, our parents say, you're just imagining things or just imagining ghosts or whatever, rather than saying, tell me about that imagination, you know?

1:04:06And I think, I mean, Einstein in his theories, he talks specifically about how the images informed the development of his theories, how important it was for him. And he said something like, you know, studying physics is children's play compared to studying children's play. And I think he really, really, really appreciate imagination and how important imagination is and how he gifted me with this gift of imagination. So I would say, don't let anybody tell you you're imagining things, see where they take you. And that was, again, with my book I made to follow the truth, no matter where it went. I started with a quote, a Jewish quote.

1:04:56What is truer than truth? Answer the story. And I really hope that all of you will tell your stories. If it's only for yourself to do that and if it's to write about it and to publish it, I wish you well. May you stand tall and walk in beauty. Coming up, Peter talks about some practices that can fortify us in times of difficulty and facing mortality.

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1:07:21Let me ask a practical question. This loops back to something you said a while ago. You talked about this memory of your parents building a toy train track around your bed when you were four or five. Is that a practice that the rest of us could adopt to re-inhabit moments of feeling, love, connection, support as a way to fortify us in moments of difficulty? Yes. They're always there if we are willing to open to them, if we trust enough to open to them. They're always there or we wouldn't have survived, really. I truly believe that we all have these moments of joy, of being cared for, of being excited.

1:08:11Yeah, I think that's part of the human condition. I mean, we may have had a lot of bad stuff happen, and many of us do, as so did I. But I am convinced that even before trauma, we had this experience of being cared for, of being loved. And that will be there after we die. It will always be there. It will be with us. And if we believe that there are such images, I think you'll find they show up. You know, they say, what is it? What's that saying? If you build it, they will come. So if you believe that that's a possibility, I think you'll find that. And it may involve also writing down your dreams and exploring your dreams and relating what the dreams are showing you to what's going on in your body, in your organism to find greater vitality, greater aliveness.

1:09:12greater here and now presence. You said something about how those moments of support, love, connection will be there after we die. But how do we know, how do you or how does anybody know what's going to be there after we die? You got me on that one, Dan. Actually, the last chapter in the book is Living My Dying. And it's really about starting to face my mortality. because at the age I am, there are many more years behind me than in front of me. And so I don't know what will happen. And I guess the question I ask myself is, can I stay curious? Can I trust that when it happens, parts of me will occur?

1:10:02This is the part of me here. He's holding up a picture of himself as a baby, a toddler. When I had that experience is another experience of joy. And this is who I want to return to. It's he who I want to accompany me when I leave this life. Well, you were a cute baby. Thank you. How would that full body joy version of Peter, how would that version of you accompany you when you die? What do you imagine practically? You know, you're going to get me thinking about this, really thinking about this. You know, somebody, I think Stan Kellerman wrote that when we've lived our life fully, we're not afraid of death.

1:10:53And I must say, I'm not there yet. And I think I have a lot more living to do. Again, I think that's one of the things that motivated me to write the book, to really look at where my next enlivening will be. And, you know, I think death is a great mystery, what Carl Jung called the mysterium tremendum, that we do not know. I don't know what it will be like, what will happen. And part of me is scared, but part of me is like, I have more things I want to do here in my life that bring me greater joy. You know, there's an expression in Hebrew called tikum alam, which means to leave the world in a better place than you found it.

1:11:42And I hope in one small way that I have left the world in a better place. And I think that also will support a more peaceful passing. So basically, I don't know what it's going to be like. I get hints. My dreams sometimes take me along that pathway. But I continue to ask myself this question, what will it be like? Will I feel loved? Will I feel accompanied? And I hope so. But I don't know for sure. I don't think any of us knows for sure. But as we open into our lives, more fully into our lives, I think then we'll be more fully embodied and ready to shed our bodies as we change our form, as we leave our bodies and go into a place yet unknown in this mystery of tremendousness.

1:12:41Well said. It's a beautiful place to leave it. Let me ask you, Peter, before I let you go, two questions that I generally ask at the end of interviews. The first is, was there something you were hoping to talk about that we didn't get to? You know, it was a very full discussion. I found myself animated. I found myself emotionally touched. I feel that I'm taking some of this, our interview with me, into my life. And I hope I'll actually have the wherewithal to look at the podcast when it's played. But I can't think of anything more that I would want to add, except for the parts of my life that are yet unfinished.

1:13:27And I hope that I'm moving to finishing those parts. I hope so too. I will take many aspects of this interview with me going forward as well. And so let me just finish with this question, which is, can you please remind everybody of the name of your new book, the names of your older books, and anything else you want us to know about. Okay. The newest book is called An Autobiography of Trauma, A Healing Journey. I also wrote, my first book was Waking the Tiger, which I wrote in 1992, but didn't get published until 95 or 96, called Waking the Tiger Healing Trauma. And then my main book for clinicians, but also for lay people, is In an Unspoken Voice, How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Good this really much of the topic of our conversation this time.

1:14:20And then I wrote another book on memory because many lay people and therapists as well don't really understand the difference between normal memory and traumatic memory. And so I wrote a book titled Trauma and Memory, Brain and Body in the Search for the Living Past. So again, that gives me another good feeling that I leave that with people to read and to learn from and maybe to remember me. Yeah, to remember me by. And you can go to the website, somaticexperiencing.com. There's also a link to traumahealing.org. And if people want to find therapists in their area, because we have trained therapists in like 44 different countries, you can get that information from their website, from that website.

1:15:08I'm glad you mentioned that. We will put links to everything that Peter just mentioned in the show notes. So if you're on the go, you can just come back to the show notes and click on them. Meanwhile, Peter A. Levine, thank you very much for coming on today. Gladly. And thank you, Dan.

1:15:28Thanks again to Peter A. Levine. If you're interested in this stuff and you want to go deeper, we are going to post two episodes from the polyvagal therapist, Deb Dana. One of them is actually done in collaboration with a meditation teacher named Kyra Juulingo. We're also going to post a few other episodes, including one from Dr. Jacob Hamm and one from Willa Blythe Baker. And I also want to say, if you want to practice with me in person, two opportunities coming up. First, on Sunday, September 21st, from 1 o 'clock to 5 o 'clock, I'll be doing a half-day retreat with a great meditation teacher named Leslie Booker, who's been on the show before.

1:16:03We'll be doing this at the New York Insight Meditation Center. The workshop is called The Dharma of Depression and Anxiety, which sounds a little dark, but actually is incredibly useful. And then coming up in October, I'm going to do a weekend long thing at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. We call it Meditation Party. I'll be joined by my friends, Seben A. Selassie and Jeff Warren, and also this year for the first time, Afosu Jones-Korte. That's October 24th through 26th. I'll put links to both of these events in the show notes. So sign up. Finally, thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard on the show.

1:16:36Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

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