How Relationships Heal Inflammation, Trauma, and Your Nervous System

24:50And he gave me something that was very hard to hear that needed to be said. And I love him even more for risking the whole friendship out of love. Like he was willing to throw away the friendship because he cared about me so much to tell me this. And that's a high bar. I mean, I think that speaks to what... He's a remarkable human being. In my mind. What defines friendship is the ability to be authentically who you are and to be authentic and transparent with your friend. Just like your friend was. I mean, he gave me the whole preamble. Yeah. And that's a very scary thing for people to actually let down their guard, right?

25:35To be open and to risk. And it's fearful, but that's what creates real friendship. Yeah, I think so. That's what creates real friendships. Another friend of mine is struggling. I'm so attuned to friends these days. another friend of mine is struggling with one of her friends and she asked herself if i was in a marriage and my marriage or just a romantic relationship a long-term romantic relationship and the relationship was struggling we wouldn't just break up we would we would get help we would seek therapy couples couples counseling yeah and so she went to her friend and said this is tension has been going over too long um we're going to go to therapy together friends therapy yeah and And again, why do we instinctively understand that if a marriage or a relationship is struggling, that we expect people to at least try, to at least try the couple's therapy before you call the whole thing quits.

26:28And yet we don't do that with friendships. When we have tension with friendships, we're quicker to end the friendship or sit in weird tension or avoid the person than to go to the therapy with the person to try and work through the struggles. We may still end up breaking up. Yeah. But let's at least put in the effort to rescue this friendship that we claim we care about. I love the idea of friendship counseling. It used to be that when people came to couples therapy, they came actually for their children. They didn't come to couples therapy. They came and slowly we would identify that there was something maybe in the relationship that also was interacting with the challenges that the child was having.

27:11Couples therapy really became a discipline of its own in the center that it is today when the expectations around intimate relationships began to rise. The more we expect from the couple and the more we need couples therapy to help us with those expectations. When the couple was not the central unit of the family, but because the family was more important than the couple and people stay together for the family. Yeah. Today, not the children and not the family. It really will keep people together. They may keep them a few more years. But ultimately, what keeps people together is the quality of the relationship between the two people.

27:53Yeah, right. So therefore, couples therapy becomes a much more sought after practice. I don't just do communication. You know, I was thinking and I was editing another podcast session and it's an incredible session. It's the first session of season five that I'm producing now. And they come in and he says, you know, we are both people who like things to be done, who like to do things our way. And I said, that's okay. That's interesting. But what I'm hearing also is that you are two people who like other people to do things your way. Yeah. That's what they meant, right? So then I asked, you know, how did you learn, you know, to say yes?

28:40And how did you learn to say no? And he begins to tell me a whole story of how basically his father would continuously belittle him, lecture to him, be contemptuous. You know, we would start with the conversation, son. And then what followed was often, you know, berating him for all the things that he wasn't doing right and living up to expectations. and she grows up with a drug addicted mother father who commits suicide and she is the adult in the house from that little mom and raises her two children they say to me at one point we fight about everything we don't communicate and i say i don't think you fight about everything at all actually i think you're fighting about the same thing all the time the moment he experiences you are saying to him, you're incompetent, you're not doing it well, you're not doing it right, he is in that original wound of him, of his.

29:46And the moment he says, you're not going to tell me what to do, you know, I'm doing it, I'm out of here, and he goes for a break, you think I'm once again all alone with all the responsibilities and the four children on my shoulders, and I will always be alone and I will never have anybody by my side. And you fight about that original wound. That's what every argument is actually about. It's the same story over and over. You know, and that was so illuminating for them that it wasn't about the chore chart that she had made and it wasn't about the kids and it wasn't about his parents. It was about, you know, I don't want to be inadequate and I don't want to be alone.

30:30Those were the The themes that each one was really, and then we started to work. So that becomes different than just communicating. How do you say things nicer? Yeah, yeah. How do you get people to kind of move past those really primordial conditionings of childhood? That's the$64 ,000 question. Yes. I think the most important thing is that you teach people two things. When I say teach, it means you help them see two things. You help them separate the past from the present. The fact that this brings back vividly the experience of back then doesn't mean that it is actually what used to happen back then.

31:17The past and the present sometimes feel like they come together into one, but they are not. And the second thing is that you then say at seven, you were helpless. at seven you couldn't respond at seven you couldn't just leave the house and say this is dangerous for me to be here um you you you know um whereas now you are an adult and you have choices so and then you go and you basically help them first of all through the body to separate the past from the present in this moment i get that tension like i want to start fighting like this man was a master of defiance you know but he got all his confidence through defiance which means that it was pseudo confident and when she would actually say go ahead and do things i'm with you i support you then he would start to talk about all his doubts he was always sure only when he was in opposition yeah when he was in a fight and he knew what he wanted but when he had somebody who was actually loving and giving, then he didn't know what to do with himself.

32:25And you go through the body and you track the feeling because a feeling is also embodied, you know. Then you articulate the experience. And then you know what I really did with them? I really had a lot of fun. They had a lot of fun. I said, lay down, flat on the floor. And then I said, now continue the argument. Do you know that you can't fight when you're lying flat? Yeah. Or if you take your clothes off, I think that's another thing I've heard from couples. Everybody take their clothes off. It's hard to have a fight. You know, it's like we are meant to fight in straight up position like mammals, you know.

33:02So then it opened up a completely different and it went from the fighting to the action behind the fighting, which is often the fear of loss, which is often will you leave me? Will you be there for me, etc.? And then you go deeper, deeper, deeper. And that takes some time. That's so beautiful. Well, you know, Esther, you've been at the front seat of literally probably hundreds, if not thousands of relationships in ways that most people don't ever have insight into by simply the virtue of your job. Just like I've seen so many people who've been sick. You've seen so many people who've had relationship challenges.

33:38So in that perspective, looking back after decades of doing this, what do you define as the success of relationships day to day? Like what are the keys to a successful relationship? And what are the things that really destroy relationships? Yeah. I will start with what destroys them. And I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes. I will really refer to the work of John Gottman and John and Julie Gottman here on what destroys them. You know, they have a wonderful way of kind of separating between the masters and the disasters. And they talk about the four horses of apocalypse. Yeah. And basically what will kill relationships is chronic criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and the killer of them all is contempt.

34:29Because contempt, and this we know also in large scale traumas, is contempt is the dehumanizing. Contempt is whatever you feel or think is irrelevant and doesn't matter. You don't even reach me. so that those those four horses of apocalypse i think kind of summarize things well and once so criticism a lot of things defensiveness criticism defensiveness and stonewalling basically shutting it shutting down right shutting people out yes yes we're rolled off and contempt which is basically the you know um shame is on the shame is one side and contempt And shame is contempt for oneself and contempt for the other.

35:09It goes in both directions. Yeah. I think when I once wanted to write a paper, I wanted to write a paper about what are creative couples. Because we talk about lasting couples, we talk about stable couples, but we rarely talk about what is creative couples or what you may include in successful couples. And what was fascinating is what you said before. the majority of people when i said do you know couples who have a spark couples who inspire you and i and people would on occasion come up with one maybe two often none um it was really scary to them because if i said can you come up with entrepreneurs with artists with writers with intellectuals people have lists of people that inspire of course but here is everybody wanting to be in a relationship and not many people you know uh can think about yeah i like that i want to do this i never wrote the people the paper because what people ended up saying seemed rather banal to me as in that's i know that but then i i've been sitting on this thing for years thinking actually maybe it's not that known but what they said was this and that was very interesting this is not in order one is admiration admiration for your partner it's not respect it's different admiration always implies a level of idealization is i look up to you i i admire you for who you are as a person as a human being more than just in your role as a partner as a parent as a you know well so that was one big one two the relationship is basically a foundation with wings, meaning there's a solid anchor of trust.

37:00And that solid anchor of trust interacts with the ability to take risks in life and in the relationship and to be playful. It's what I often have looked at the combination between or the integration between our need for security and safety and predictability and reliability and our need for change and novelty and exploration and discovery. These two fundamental human needs. I think that the best relationships have a nice balance between what is togetherness and what is separateness. People have their own lives. But before I even continue, I think the best thing to say is this. There is no one size fits all.

37:48It's all, yeah, yeah. I can't tell you one. It's like you with health. it's not like you have a sense in hell that it's an interaction of different parts of course it is more of this or more of that you know some couples have venn diagrams that are completely overlapping they do everything together they spend all their time together and it works beautifully yeah and some other very creative and successful couples are much more differentiated and actually they have a strong core but with big individual lives you know separate so there is no one size fits all i really would love that to be actually my opening line to your question before i even say what makes for success people who feel free in a relationship that makes for success for sure people who feel oppressed or under surveillance or who have to constantly lie or hide or you know or not say what they bought or what is, you know, that kind of stuff.

38:47Those are major differences that I would add to the Gottman list. You know, it's a degree of autonomy matched with a deep sense of belonging. These two together is a beautiful dance. It's beautiful. But I think there's some really practical ways that you talk about for people to achieve whatever it is their best relationship is, right? boundaries, routines, rituals. What are the kinds of things that you help people establish within their relationship to build that foundation, that structure? Because it's not something that we know automatically. It's not something we actually are taught. How do you help people build those structures and those relationships that help them get to that?

39:29So it's very interesting. This couple that I was mentioning before, where he kind of walled himself off with no needs because he was all alone and there was nobody who could help him anyway. And she is like permeated by all these voices. I thought that I had done a rather limited session with them. I really thought, hmm, I didn't really reach them. I didn't really go underneath the noise, et cetera. And then I get a letter to them that you never know. You never know about how much some of the tiny things that I did that I thought were almost slightly, you know, they were not basically i would say it's one thing to say how about you tell esther about this versus shutting your partner up and talking for them of course you want to to bring something up but you also want to let them tell their own story yeah how about when you have a problem or a question about sex or about children you don't first go to your mother and grandmother but you also go first to your partner.

40:42And you set a boundary with all the people from your family so that you can create a more sacred space with your partner. The boundary is not always inside the relationship. It's between the relationship and the outside world. How about you are able to make a request that isn't a protest? So say what you need rather than what the other person is or is not doing. Just make a request and stick to that. And adding up these things, basically, they write to me three weeks later and say, there's been a fundamental shift. We haven't had a single fight. I was able to no longer go and talk to my mother about everything.

41:24He feels much more open to me because I'm much less critical with him. And I appreciate his openness. And that makes me more fond of him. And that makes him more asexual with me and more expressive of his desire for me. And it becomes the opposite of the escalation in the negative direction is now a kind of escalating, the going up in the positive direction. That's the work. Yeah, it's so powerful. It's so powerful. One of the things that you've learned after decades of working with couples and relationships that are sort of nuggets of wisdom that you would lead people with about that can help them with relationships that they may be struggling with?

42:03You know, what are the things that people should anchor to? And of course, there's your book, Made in Captivity and the State of Affairs and your podcast and all that, which is great. People should dive into that in your TED Talks. But I wonder if you could kind of distill down, you know, what you really learned. The first thing I would say, and I think I have really, really learned it from, you know, the millions of people that listen to Where Should We Begin, is that you're not alone. These days, on the one hand, we have unprecedented expectations of our couple's lives, but at the same time, we are also in a machine of fake news on social media.

42:43So people curate and posture and filter, and you kind of don't know where is the truth. You know, when people lived in the village, you heard the fights of the neighbors and you heard the frolics of the neighbors. Now your best friends can come and tell you that they're breaking up and you never saw it coming. Yeah, right. Nobody tells you the truth about what goes on in the couple's relationships. And yet, and then you're left thinking, these are - Everybody's great, right. They're doing great and we are alone with our problems. And so I think really, where should we begin, showed me that when you listen deeply to the stories of others, you see yourself in front of your own mirror and you don't feel as alone and you get the tools for the conversations that you want to have.

43:27I think that's the first thing I really realized, that this is a unit that doesn't talk. Friends talk to friends. Couples often talk to nobody about what's really going on. They may be struggling with infidelity. They may be struggling with infertility. They may be struggling with bipolarity and mental health issues. They may be struggling with unresolved grief. They may be struggling with economic hardships, with unemployment, with addictions. and they won't talk about it to anybody because they have to present themselves a certain way. And it breaks my heart sometimes to see how alone people are with some of these major, major challenges.

44:06So that's the first thing I've really learned is to make sure that that's part of the game too, is to give people a tool to make hard conversations less difficult. The second thing that I have really learned is this couple that I was describing where I thought, oh my God, this is, you know, they really came in to say, we need you to tell us, are we broken? Are we beyond repair? And, and I thought, at the end of the session, I thought, I don't know where this is going. And I have been so many times surprised by people where I think there's not much left here. And then when you change one thing, like this woman, she stopped trying to change him and she went ahead and took responsibility for her contribution and she changed a few things about her own behavior and it just unleashed a cascade of changes for the for the better and that is a real important piece sometimes it looks like everything is over is interconnected and it's like impossible heap of of of nuisance and yet if you make one shift it has the power because systems are interdependent parts to activate everything else that's the second thing that is very important the third thing is that there is a big difference between what you feel inside and how what you experience inside affects the people around you you may be depressed and feel weak and hopeless and helpless and anedonic but when you are in relationship with those who love you you often wield all the power yeah because you activate everybody around you to try to make you feel better to give you advice to lift you up and in the end they feel defeated and deflated like you so power doesn't always come from the top down power often comes from the bottom up, from places that are not nearly that obvious.

46:19I think we really don't understand enough the complex interplay of power dynamics in relationships. If you want to change the other, change yourself. And maybe the last thing I would say is beyond most issues that people argue about, there generally are three themes. control and power care and closeness and respect and recognition whose priorities matter who has the power here can i trust you do you have my back yeah and do you value me yeah those are huge these are these are the three major themes that many many couples basically struggle about but And it comes in the forms of talks about sex and money and family and heroes.

47:13But that's not the issue. It's not the issue. It's the emotional crucible in which those issues play off. How do we know if we're in a toxic relationship versus a healing relationship? Step one is you're in projection. You're not aware of your unintegrated pain, your partner's pain, and you're blaming one another essentially, and trying to have that person meet your needs and refusing to meet your own needs, which is a big one. I want you to say all the things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that, I think that's the first fallacy relationship that our partner's job is to meet our needs. That is not their job.

47:49Ding, ding, ding. That's our job. That's our job. Yes. Yes. And that points to, which is very useful information. So when we see that in ourselves, we don't have to shame ourselves. We can look at that and go, okay. So for example, me, I had this unmet need in my childhood so my greatest unmet need from my perspective as a child was that i i just needed a safe and stable place so before i did this healing work i was running around looking for a man to give me a safe and stable place but refusing to give it to myself yeah and that that was my inner 10 year old running my love life and sex life and most of us who haven't done any relational healing work have a 10 year old a 12 year old a seven year old running our love life and our sex life yeah which is i didn't get this need met and i'm going to find someone who reminds me of the person who didn't meet the need and i'm going to play out my unfinished business with my parents with them and hope that they meet the need even though i'm refusing to meet it myself so yes step one owning your needs which by the way actually makes it easier for other people to meet your needs that's the kind of like mind-bending part of that when you when you come to someone and you're not saying i need you to do this or else and you say you know i recognize it's my responsibility to create a safe and stable place for me.

49:03And I will always be the one to do that for myself. And if I, you know, I always come back to at least aiming to do that for myself. I know it's my responsibility, but can you help me? Different energy, right? And so moving into a healing relationship is taking ownership of your own work. And then who are the people in your life, whether it's romantic partners, friends, family members, who empower you to do your own work, They can't do it for you, but they can love, support, encourage, and empower you to do your own personal development work. To, as the cliche, become a better person through them loving you, supporting you, and you doing your own work.

49:46A toxic relationship is one in which you feel consistently disempowered from doing your healing work. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I found a new framework that's really helped me in my current relationship, which has really been extraordinary. And that is, there's me, there's her, there's us, and then there's this third entity, which is the stuff that we bring into the relationship. You know, the traumas, the triggers, the fears that aren't really who we truly are, but are things that we've brought in. And then instead of being obstacles, there are opportunities to actually together hold them outside of the container of the relationship and look at them and be curious about them and explore them without judgment, without fear, or without having to have a certain outcome, but just in an honest, clear, and curious way.

50:48go, hmm, gee, this is coming up for me. And instead of me going, oh, that means you don't like me, or that means blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, okay, this is interesting. Where is that from? What's that about? You know, how am I showing up that's creating that? Or where is that a place where we can learn about what's driving us? And how do we become free from it? It's a very different framework, you know, because I often see people sort of dug in, you know I'm not meeting you're not meeting my needs you're not meeting my needs it's like it's like I'm not going to do what you want me to do until you do what I want to do and it's like this crazy weird dynamic that this doesn't get anywhere and it's it's like it's it's like if you look at love as a container for creating your own spiritual evolution then it becomes a very different perspective on how to actually be in the relationship.

51:45It's not about them fixing you or you fixing them. It's about being curious together about how to evolve together and individually. Yes. And what you just described so beautifully is what we touched on earlier, which is this idea of undifferentiating, unblending from your reaction, but still looking at it and sharing about it. Curiously, one of my good friends, Sadhu Simone, is an amazing buddhist teacher and he says the quality of your curiosity is the quality of your liberation and i love that it's what you're saying it's can i create enough space to look at what i'm feeling not disassociate from it not disconnect not shove it down no have it leak out sideways but can i just have enough space so we can be curious about what's here and learn how to grow from it and shift from when I win, you lose or vice versa, this win, lose power struggle.

52:39Yep. Into how do we compassionately and creatively get both of our needs met? Takes creativity. Yeah. Or how do we, how do we actually realize that our happiness isn't really about the other person meeting our needs, but us becoming whole human beings and meeting each other as two whole human beings. in the context of love. It's something we don't really have a model for. I certainly did not have that model for me as a boy. It certainly isn't modeled in our culture. It's certainly modeled in books and movies and TV. And so we're kind of flying blind a little bit. And what's really exciting is that there's this sort of emerging consciousness around love and sexuality and redefining what love is that kind of is exploring a don't-leaday way of thinking about it.

53:33I read a book called All About Love by Bell Hooks, who's recently died, a woman who was really insightful, talking about the nature of love. And it kind of was great because it kind of taught me that a lot of the ideas, the concepts, the beliefs, the conditioning, the norms are kind of fabricated. And what would love look like if we kind of shed those and we ask ourselves, you know, what do we want? How do we create a different way of being with someone? and to use all those opportunities, whether they're triggers or things that cause us to kind of have some physical sensation or body of fear or disconnect as a gift, as an opportunity to look at ourselves and to look at what's happening and to be able to transmute that into a really different way of relating to somebody.

54:23Yes, yes. And we need skills. It's about upskilling, right? I didn't know about conscious communication, right? I didn't know about regulating my nervous system. I didn't know about being hijacked by my emotions, my reactions and my triggers or how to get space from that. Like that's my aim is to upskill my clients, right? Not just the somatic healing work, but also to give them and upskill them in relationships, in sex. Like what are the skills we actually need to succeed? Because, and also this healing relationship, it's not about perfection, but you do want, as you're, as you're sharing, what is the vision and intention for your relationship?

54:59It might look totally different is it that you want to spiritually evolve together is it that you want to create a safe space to do your own healing such that your relationship becomes a healing presence for your kids for your family for your community like what is the intention of even being with one another like why are you together so that when you forget because lord knows you will hopefully one of you can remain in your mature adult and can help to empower the other to remember why are we here to remember what is the style of communication we've agreed on we don't use name calling we don't use raise voices i love you but i won't allow that that's not within our framework we have different skills we have a different intention and learning how to repair after rupture because even if you have all the best intentions me and my husband have we still i still act like a petulant child sometimes and i think oh wow still got work to do but i have the skills now to repair yeah exactly yeah i think that's right i think you know a lot of us it's almost like you know we wouldn't imagine getting in a car where you know everything was unpredictable where the car was for right which left the brakes would slam on the gas would go forward you know it would flip around backwards i mean we wouldn't we'd be terrified but that's exactly how we navigate emotionally in relationships it's like it's like some crazy person driving the car right you know and blaming and blaming the other person in the passenger seat for you know how it's driving exactly and and so learning how to kind of get a hold of the control a control switch is on our amygdala which is our ancient we call it our fight or flight response but in medicine we learned they were the four f's the feeding which is our baby around food fight or flight and reproduction that was the fourth i thought you were gonna say fawn flight fight freeze flight fawn but no i like that the fourth f yes very important and so our behavior really is often triggered by these ancient survival mechanisms that aren't really serving us anymore yes and i'm sort of curious about a lot of these ancient techniques around you know embodied sexuality and there yes there's more and more talk about it there's more courses that people can take you know there's things that actually help people discover that.

57:22And I'm, I'm super curious about it and exploring it myself. And I think that, uh, you know, it's, it's sort of almost criminal that we don't have a, a cultural narrative of how to get through these challenging aspects of love, relationship, and sexuality. And that's why your work is so important. It sort of gives people a roadmap, you know, to figure things out, which, which really we don't have a language for, we don't have a framework for, and yet it exists. I mean, it's been there throughout historical cultures, whether it's Tantra or other ways of thinking about love, relationship, healing the mind, perception, Buddhism, all of it.

58:02I think a friend of mine wrote, Susan Piper wrote, The Four Noble Truths of Love. It's all about how do we get out of this sort of projection of our conditioning, our trauma, our lineages, and bring that into relationship and actually start to heal that. That's really what seems like the work that we have to do, because right now we're in such a divisive society. There's so much conflict, not just in relationship, in love relationships, in family relationships, but in society as a whole. I mean, it's just sort of staggering to me the amount of conflict. I mean, there always was, I guess, throughout history, but it just seems to be ramped up and polarized more than I've ever known.

58:44I mean, America didn't seem to be two Americas before, and now it seems to be completely two Americas, which is so tragic. Yeah. I mean, Ken Wilber, who I mentioned earlier, describes expansion of consciousness as the ability to expand what we are aware of and care for. So to both be aware of and caring of. And I think that for me, that looks like, and what I see people learn how to do through the somatic healing work is hold more complexity with care. That I can make a mistake, I can hurt myself or someone else and I can still be a good human being. I'm still worthy of love. I'm still, I can have a really period of low of depression and be overcome with sadness and I'm still valuable.

59:30I still have value. There's this complexity, this ability to hold more with more care And I think if we each were able to do that on an individual level, we'd be able to hold more complex human beings in front of us that people can say something you don't like and still be worthy of love and belonging. People can have a different opinion to you and still be worthy of your time and connection. You know? Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I deal with all sorts of people as a doctor. I can't choose who comes in my office. I can't choose what they believe, what their religious beliefs are, their political beliefs.

1:00:04And at the end of the day, everybody's a human being. and that's where I start. And, you know, I remember one day my office had a Muslim, a Christian, a rabbi. I had a top Republican, a top Democrat. It was like the United Nations of medicine or something. And I was like, you know what? This is all so crazy. We're all just struggling with the same things. We all care about the same things. We all want to be happy. We all want our families to be good. We all want to live in a better world. I mean, you know, we all have different views of how to get there for sure. But I think that our common humanity has been forgotten.

1:00:42And that just really breaks my heart. And it seems to me that your work is really about getting connected to your own humanity and your own center of the universe where you're actually an embodied human that's looked at yourself carefully, that's healed the things that need to be healed, that's learned how to love yourself and others in a more integrated way. it's the most important work we have to do. I remember reading a quote. I can't remember the exact one from Dalai Lama. But essentially, it's like, we want to heal the world. We have to start with ourselves. And I think it may seem like a narcissistic pursuit, but it really isn't.

1:01:19If we don't take care of ourselves, we can't be there in the world to show up for others. And I think that's what it's all about. Yeah. And the body doesn't discriminate. You know, your body, whatever mistakes you make, you know your body's just striving even when even when we're sick the body's always striving to try and deal with the toxins and the stress and everything to try and create um a homeostasis it's like our body doesn't discriminate and what's so beautiful about the body is it's always right here right now your body is never anywhere else but right here right now and that's what i really love about this powerful path of body-based healing and i think that when we get in touch with our body, we do become more present.

1:02:03And when we're connected to our body, I believe we're connected to the gift of getting to be alive, of you, this moment, this body, this life, exactly as it is right now. And that's, for me, has been the most profound pathway or gateway into better sex and liberation and truly allowing myself to be seen by my husband, which I found excruciatingly vulnerable right i knew how to do the fourth f but did i know how to make love how to be seen no that took me learning and developing and better relationships learning how to love my darkness and still say wow okay that was not kind or i lost my temper there and i'm still worthy of love and belonging to take responsibility for and then that allows me to do it with other people i look okay wow that person lost their temper they didn't feel good okay they're still worthy can we repair so So it's like all of this work internally that does bleed outward and that is really tangible.

1:03:00That's what I love about the body too, is you have an experience of it. It's not just ideology. It's not just concept. You feel it in your own way, through your own lens, whether it's spiritual or religious or secular, and then you have that experience and no one or nothing can take it from you. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at dr.

1:03:32Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the dr. Hyman show This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the ultra wellness center My work at Cleveland Clinic and function health where I am chief medical officer This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services.

1:04:06If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible.

1:04:36Thanks so much again for listening.