Using Trauma Release Exercise to Heal Chronic Pain with Richmond Heath

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Hi, and welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, founder and CEO of the Integrative Women’s Health Institute. This is an essential listening episode for every person experiencing chronic illness or chronic pain, or especially for rehab providers, for gynecologists, for physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, manual therapists, midwives, acupuncturists every health or wellness professional that works with women with chronic illness.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:40 This is a really important episode for you, and it’s especially important if you work in fitness, occupational or physical therapy, any kind of movement. If you’re a Pilates instructor, this is going to be an essential episode for you. We’re going to learn about a technique and really just a tool that the body naturally has to release trauma, which underpins many, many chronic illnesses around digestion, around pelvic floor issues, around nervous system issues, autoimmune diseases, chronic immune reactivity, anything where one of our physiologic systems, even our mitochondria themselves, and that the cellular level is stuck due to a traumatic pattern. And the most important thing that you’re going to learn in this conversation is that we don’t have to know where the trauma came from. Could be something that our client has memory of, but it could be something even deeper, like a mold exposure or a viral exposure or something that irritates the physiology. Could be musculoskeletal, could be a different system. So I want to introduce you to Richmond Heath. He’s joining us today from Australia, and he’s a registered physiotherapist, the executive director of Trauma Release Australia, a level three tree trainer who was responsible for bringing Doctor David Bocelli and Tiara to Australia for the first time in 2011.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:26 He also holds an Advanced Diploma of Aboriginal Studies, is a qualified brown therapist, teaches clinical Pilates and has a diverse background in both public and private health sectors, including youth, community, mental health and indigenous health. He coordinates the professional training and supervision of tree trainers all throughout Australia, providing tree workshops and trainings for groups, corporations, organisations and local regions all around Australia and the Asian Pacific. He has presented internationally on a range of topics and is a clear, engaging and inspirational presenter. I can’t wait for you to meet him in our conversation, and we’ll chat on the other side about how you can take this technique right now and begin to utilize it in a safe way for yourself and your clients. As another really important tool in our toolbox of helping our clients unwind trauma. I don’t know about you, but all of my clients are struggling with trauma these days, and myself and my family and friends. And the more tools we use that are simple that can be used consistently. We have to be using them in a safe manner.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:04:42 I’ll see you on the other side. Welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m so excited to introduce you to Richmond Heath, who is going to start out by sharing with us a sort of background insight into what is trauma in terms of the physiologic response. Ideally, if we were left to our own devices and our traumatic responses were not suppressed, what would be going on physiologically after a challenging event or experience?

Richmond Heath 00:05:23 Thanks very much for having me on the podcast, Jessica. It’s great to be able to share this information. So probably the key thing for me is when we talk about our trauma responses is the trauma response is a cycle. So there’s an initial defensive reaction to protect us or help us survive, whether that’s in a stressful situation or a traumatic one. But once the traumatic event has finished, then the other half of the cycle is the recovery cycle. And that’s the part that tends to get suppressed and contained. And for me, you know, we often define trauma. And historically in the Western medical model, we’ve defined trauma based upon it needing to be a life or death situation, or you’ve seen a life or death situation.

Richmond Heath 00:06:07 So we tend to define it by the external circumstances. But when we look at the nervous system or the neuromuscular system or the hormonal system, the physiology of the body, it’s actually almost irrelevant what that external situation is. So it doesn’t matter whether there’s a car coming towards you, it doesn’t matter whether there’s a, you know, abusive relationship. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a child. and you’ve been abandoned. The physiology of the body can only really respond in the same ways. And if we make it at the most basic level, just think about your muscles. Just to keep it really simple. You know, muscles can either contract, they can collapse and be not working, or they can be, you know, moving. So at that level, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a physical threat, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a psycho emotional threat, doesn’t matter whether it’s a financial threat. And as humans, it doesn’t even matter if it’s a perceived threat and it’s not real. I mean, how many of us get stressed and anxious about things that don’t happen? That’s kind of the definition of anxiety.

Richmond Heath 00:07:07 So even then, or we can be watching TV, you know, we know it’s a film, but our muscular system is still responding. So the key thing is when we understand that the stress and trauma response is first and foremost about movement, you know, survival is about movement either moving away from a potential threat, moving towards a potential threat with all of our energy mobilized in the fight response, or if the situation or stressor seems insurmountable, then our body goes into survival mode where there is the containment of movement, and literally the movement has to be contained through the neuromuscular system, often through what we would call a freeze response or that chronic tightening and tensing up, or potentially a collapse if it’s, you know, real life and death where your system really starts to switch off, dissociate. you know, people feel like they physically can’t move, they fall unconscious. And so when we recognize that, first and foremost, our stress and trauma response is about movement in the body, then it makes sense that the recovery response is also about movement.

Richmond Heath 00:08:13 And when I use the term movement, I don’t mean moving my body through space, like doing sit ups or going for a run, or doing exercise or Pilates or yoga. That’s a huge component of it. But our stress and trauma responses are completely unconscious. This subcortical process, we’re not choosing to have tight shoulders or a tightened up digestive system or an altered autoimmune response. Those things are all happening completely unconsciously. But as mammals that have evolved over millions of years on the planet, our body has also evolved with reflexes to keep it as a simple term for the body to come back out of those trauma responses. And when we recognize traumas primarily about immobilizing the body and movement not just of the body through space, but of all the internal systems of the body. So, you know, when your immobility, trauma response, your digestive system is going to close down, immobilized, your respiratory system will often shrink. So it’s all the internal energetic systems. Your body will create low energy. So, you know, we often think depression is a low energy.

Richmond Heath 00:09:19 That’s the experience is low energy. But the body is actually creating low energy as a survival response. So when we understand those responses we can say, right, well, the body will have evolved with and has evolved with these movement responses to restore. And this is a critical piece to restore spontaneous involuntary movement. We often call neurogenic movement, meaning that the body or the nervous system is generating the movements itself, which is very different from me making a conscious volitional movement. And that’s the part that in our Western world we’ve overlooked, misunderstood, and pathologized so that if you have a car accident and you see someone has had a car accident and sitting on the side of the road shaking like crazy, we’ve all been told that’s a sign of shock. So we’re trying to stop that, give you a warm blanket, calm you down rather than understanding that the spontaneous movement is how the body is releasing the trauma responses, restoring the natural motility or variability or flexibility or pulsation, not just in the neuromuscular system, but all the systems of the body.

Richmond Heath 00:10:25 And that’s really this missing link that in the Western world, we’ve completely misunderstood and we inhibit it individually. Medically we prevent it. So if you’re a soldier, you come back from active service and a month later you’re starting to get the shakes in social settings, you’re going to get medicated. Just because it hasn’t really been researched, it hasn’t been understood. And that’s the part of the trauma response. And I wouldn’t rather call it the trauma response. I’d call it the trauma recovery Response that most of us have been culturally, individually inhibiting.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:10:57 I think it’s very interesting how you tie this neuromuscular recovery response, which you know, is very common after childbirth, after a car accident, that physical, just involuntary shaking that, as you said, what we tend to do is try to sort of calm people down or if they’re shaking for any reason, like public speaking or trying to sing or whatever. What I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about, because so many of my clients and our students clients have chronic illnesses that may have started even a decade ago, because over time, as you mentioned, all of these systems are impacted.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:39 Their motility is slower. Can we get to that five, ten, 15 years later to start kind of from the outside in reactivating, if you will, those systems, you know, getting the mitochondria back on board from an energy perspective.

Richmond Heath 00:11:57 Yeah, absolutely. Now, I’m not saying that it’s a magic bullet. And all of a sudden we do this little bit of shaking and, you know, all my history and all my physiology is perfectly aligned. But these patterns can begin in utero. They can be intergenerational patterns that are passed on. So the common example is, you know, with birth. So at that stage when we’re in utero, the brainstem and the limbic system and the sort of parts of the nervous system that respond to stress and trauma, they’re all fully developed and online. So as an example, you might get born. You could have the cord around your around your neck. You get your cord clamped as a survival mechanism, but it shuts off your oxygen supply from the placenta.

Richmond Heath 00:12:37 So the reason I share that is we often don’t think about all the different little sort of medical trauma, micro trauma, innocent traumas that happen. You know, I remember someone talking about as a child being rolled up in a carpet by their brothers and their brothers thought it was hilarious, but the person couldn’t breathe and they thought, you know, they were panicking, thought they were going to die. So, you know, this is innocent trauma. So what I’m saying here is all the things that we generally see is chronic illness and the Ace study. If your listeners don’t know about it, you should go and check out the Ace study. About. There was a breakthrough time where we recognized early childhood trauma and its impact on chronic illness. When we recognize that what we define as chronic illness, they’re the symptoms of a nervous system, which is in a highly defended state, either hyper mobilized in that chronic fight and flight stress response or chronically immobilized and shut down as a survival response, so underlying the various manifestations of most chronic illness, if not as the cause, at least as a significant exacerbation, is a nervous system which is chronically in a defensive, traumatized, for want of a better word, immobilized state, which is kind of creating those issues.

Richmond Heath 00:13:52 So as I say, someone who says depression, I’ve got low energy. Low energy is a survival response for the body to shut down the energy. So rather than thinking, I’ve got a problem, answer link withdrawn, we’re going hang on. The experiences that we’re defining as the illness is, are generally a symptom of the underlying trauma in the physiology of the body. Now, rather than that being daunting, part of the healing journey is working out. How do we help our nervous system come out of those defensive responses and get back to a more safe, comfortable, relaxed state? And that’s where the body has this ingenious innate shaking. Tremor and reflex is a key part of the physiology coming back out. So when we invoke this shaking mechanism and you can do that in a very safe and simple way through many different techniques around the world. And the one that I’m involved with is the detention and trauma release exercises. So once we invoke that, basically that is the body’s natural way of down regulating the nervous system.

Richmond Heath 00:14:51 And so what people often find is if you’ve got chronic tension, just again, thinking about the muscles, you’ve got chronic tension in your back or your neck, and the body’s basically bracing constantly as it starts to shake and tremble. It’s like that tension falls away. And so this is where we often have the sense that the shaking is releasing the physiological components of our past. But at the same time, as we keep using this response, each time the body starts to shake or tremble, the next layer or the next piece of the puzzle in terms of the physiology will start to find where can it unwind that. So the reason I’m saying that is then it’s and this is what I’m most passionate about. It’s not going I do the shake today and or magically all my traumas disappeared. People do have extraordinary experiences, but for me it’s much more about, hey, this is a reflex or a response or a resource that’s inside me that cost me nothing to activate. And once I learn how to use and activate this trembling response in a safe and controlled way.

Richmond Heath 00:15:51 Literally, my body starts to unwind itself over time. So you know what we often need to, especially when we’ve got relational trauma, is it’s one thing to kind of let go of the response in the body, but then we almost need to learn how do we go back out into the world and learn to develop relationships as well and feel more safe and comfortable? So for me, it’s about this process of using the trembling mechanism to start us on a journey or support our journey of perpetual healing and growth. And over time, this is what happens over time as we keep triggering the next little piece of the unresolved trauma in the physiology of the body falls away and we get more grounded, more connected to ourselves. We get more authentic in our experiences, and sometimes that means we become more aware of the unresolved trauma in our lives. Because we often think in this Western medical world, it’s like, I have a problem. I do x, y, or Z, and then I’m better. Whereas part of the process of healing trauma, because the trauma response disconnects us from our, you know, our body disconnects our awareness, so we get almost disembodied.

Richmond Heath 00:16:58 That could be at a micro level, like most people don’t even feel that when they bend over to touch their toes, you know, ten vertebrae are not moving at all. They’ve got a completely rigid spine, because when things don’t move, we don’t feel them and the body is learning to cope with it. So there’s a disconnection. And that’s a critical piece of our trauma response. We don’t even consciously know this because we’re not feeling it. And so as the body starts to move, it literally starts to reawaken the connection between our mind and our body and our awareness of our body. And then over time, we often become more aware of, you know, for me, for example, I’d been teaching polarities for, I think, five years full time. I’ve done a million different pelvic floor contractions. I’d been teaching people everyone about this. And, you know, with a history of chronic back pain and sciatic pain prior to that, and after about 4 or 5 months of teaching, trio member standing at a workshop and talking to someone and I just noticed that I felt nervous.

Richmond Heath 00:17:54 I didn’t really know anything more. I just felt a bit uncomfortable. And I took a breath. And in that moment, my pelvic floor let go and it felt like it hit the floor. I literally turned around, almost looked down at my bottom, went, Holy shit, what just happened? And so what I discovered in that moment was I didn’t know that part of the experience of feeling nervous was that my pelvic floor was gripped on really tight and had been gripped on probably since I was a baby. Now the reason I’m sharing that is that started to become like a light on my dashboard, because rather than just going, I’m feeling nervous. I was getting connected back to my body that my pelvic floor had been squeezed on. And then over a few months, over time, as I was watching this coming on, every time I was stressed and every time I was calm, it would let go a little bit and stress. At some point, I had another experience where I discovered when that was coming on, I was actually feeling anxious in these social settings, which I never knew.

Richmond Heath 00:18:47 I just thought I was an introvert. I thought I didn’t like parties or whatever, but what I’m saying there was the containment and the neuromuscular containment. It’s not just about movement. It also is containing our embodied experience of our emotions. So, you know, it’s like, I love the analogy of the iceberg, where, you know, our conscious mind is above the surface. That’s like 5 or 10%. Everything else is happening in the physiology of the body. And the trauma response is designed to protect us from overwhelming experiences. Literally, if I’m getting eaten to death by the proverbial saber toothed tiger, I don’t want to experience that and embody that. So part of the trauma in the immobility response is the body disconnects the mind. And we’re not even aware of how traumatized most of us are because, you know, you come and see me as a physiotherapist. In my mind, it’s like, oh no, you’ve got a tight back, you’ve got tight muscles. It’s just because of the way you’re sitting or that, and we haven’t really been understood.

Richmond Heath 00:19:42 We’re going, hang on. These are underlying trauma patterns that the body is. And this is for me, a really critical thing that the body is creating in the moment. So the phrase I like to use, Jessica, is trauma is a verb. And what I mean by that is we often think, you know, a lot of us have been given the story. I’ve got my bucket of, you know, trauma or stress and the buckets full and there’s another little bit gets tipped in. And then it’s going to take me years to tip it out. But when we look at the physiology of the body, it doesn’t matter how traumatized if we give you a general anesthetic, all of that muscular tension falls away. All of those tension, all of those physiological patterns fall away. And when you go into REM sleep at night, the physiology of the body is completely changing. So it’s important to recognize that the symptoms and the chronic illnesses we have, in my opinion, they are an expression of a system which is actively creating a defensive trauma response in the moment.

Richmond Heath 00:20:39 So it’s no different to if I’ve been bitten by a black dog as a child and my body’s learnt that anything associated with dogs is dangerous. And someone brings me in a fluffy white puppy that’s only two days old. There’s no threat whatsoever, but my body starts to generate anxiety. I mean, this is what we would call a phobia. So in that moment there is no threat. But my system is responding actively as if there is a threat. And so this is where with chronic illness, what we’re looking to support. And it’s not the only element it’s going to say, it’s not saying this is this magic thing. Like if you do trembling every day and then you eat 16 hamburgers and watch reality TV, you’re probably going to keep your chronic illness. Your life is not going to be good. But what we’re looking for, right?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:21:23 It’s not the only issue.

Richmond Heath 00:21:24 That’s right. It’s not the only thing. It’s part of a big, you know, integrative sort of field that we want to do.

Richmond Heath 00:21:28 But the key thing is we’re looking to find ways to help our organism or support our organism to switch off its active sort of stress and trauma responses in the moment. And that’s where the shaking and treasuring reflex has evolved in mammals and all humans, but it’s something we just overlook and we don’t necessarily understand or use.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:21:52 So one of the things that I like that’s so interesting about what you just said is that we can access now kind of these patterns of trauma response without necessarily having to know, because I think sometimes people don’t know what their bucket of traumas are. So it’s hard to then, you know, use things like talk therapy if people don’t even have an awareness of it, and especially for things that are more like autoimmune chronic illnesses or digestive chronic illnesses, where it might have been a physiologic trauma, you know, a virus or a metabolic dysregulation or something like that, it’s hard to then sort of unwind that.

Richmond Heath 00:22:39 Absolutely. So that’s one of the limitations of our existing sort of talk therapy based model is to say, okay, my body’s gone into complete immobility, shutdown in relation to mold.

Richmond Heath 00:22:50 Okay. Well, I want you to talk about that. How can you say, oh, well, the mold did this and it went into my system like there’s no story. Similar things are happening when we look at the children of people involved in mass trauma, like the Holocaust or 911, you know, babies that were in utero are coming out with, you know, post-traumatic stress, basically. So it’s like asking them, well, okay, I want you to talk about that experience that happened when you were completely unconscious in your mother’s tummy. So this is where there’s a limit to using talk therapy. And one of the key things is our conscious mind or our ego for just to keep a simple use. We love to try and understand things, and we think that the solution to all our problems is going to be when we understand what caused them. So the founded theory of theory, David Bocelli, he had a wonderful story where he’d been working in war zones and natural disasters and had his own experience of post-traumatic stress, And he got sent off to, you know, through his organization, sent off to do psychotherapy, which he did for a year or two.

Richmond Heath 00:23:48 And I’ll never forget him making this great statement at a workshop is explaining the story. And he said, look, at the end of two years or however long it was, he said, I knew where all of my trauma came from. I knew all the issues about my mum and my father, but the trauma I’d been through, but I was still sick. So for him and you know, it’s that thing going there is all of these patterns in our nervous system. It doesn’t really matter. And our conscious mind thinks, if I just know what the problem is, then I’ll be able to fix it. And then most of us find go, oh, okay. Well, I know that I’ve got what the original trauma was, but doesn’t mean that it’s changed in the physiology of the body. And on the flip side, Jessica and I love to explain this to people when they’re learning tra and learning to shake and tremor our conscious mind. And he goes, like, I need to understand what’s happening, is that the nervous system down regulating is the hormonal things changing, you know, all that sort of thing.

Richmond Heath 00:24:39 And I love to explain to people that our body doesn’t care to hurts. It doesn’t need to know what the research and the evidence was. It doesn’t matter whether my conscious mind interprets the thing from a neurological perspective and energetic perspective. You know, Kundalini, hormonal responses, whatever it is, it just needs an opportunity to be able to do its natural processes. So for me, part of the beauty of using this tremor and shaking responses, you know, and tree we use a poly vaguely informed neuroscientific model. But I like to explain to people, look, that’s really only there to get your conscious mind and your ego out of the way, or to make sense of it enough to let go and let the body start to shake and tremble, because the body doesn’t care whether you understand it. The body doesn’t care whether you know where your original trauma was, even though you’re not generally not going to know apart from people who do have a very specific trauma. And what we see often happening is Rather than us trying to go searching for what’s the cause of the trauma, which is a very intellectual head based thing.

Richmond Heath 00:25:46 What often happens is if there is a specific trauma associated with some pattern in the body, then as people are shaking and trembling, that memory will arise. People will have an moment like going, oh my God, my shoulders been doing all these weird movements for three weeks and it’s just come to me that that’s exactly how I landed when I fell off the horse. Or you know something, if it’s a one off shock trauma. But at the same time, if you grew up in a household with a, you know, say you had a parent with mental health or substance abuse who was in an altered state, if you’ve got, you know, ten years of growing up with chronic bracing and tension, you’re probably not going to have a single memory of, oh, it was this particular time. Your system has just learnt how to survive and stay safe and cope with life in these chronically defended states. And that’s where I say it’s not about just saying, oh right, I’m going to do one trauma session and all my trauma is gone.

Richmond Heath 00:26:41 We’re using it to retrain, you know, constantly retrain the system to go I can survive. Not only can I survive, but I can become more a vital and alive with less defense in the system in the same way that, you know, if you go to the gym and you do one gym session, are you going to get stronger now? You’ll probably feel weaker straight afterwards. If you meditate, you do a weekend course. I’ve done meditation now. My mind is perfectly clear. Well, of course not. It’s going to go back to those repetitive patterns. And so this is where for me, with tra, once you learn this technique, you can lie in bed at night, bring your knees up. You don’t need to pay me all the time for it. You know how to use it yourself. So you’re constantly using it not just to reset the nervous system, although there’s a lot of people use it to sort of blow off the stress of the day. But once you’re out of those acute stress responses to what I’m dealing with today, the body then starts to go deeper into itself and start to release older patterns.

Richmond Heath 00:27:34 So over time you get this like progressive unwinding or unfurling or reconnection or reawakening with your body that goes, you know, for the rest of your life.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:27:48 So can you explain a bit what the technique is, how you help people learn how to do this?

Richmond Heath 00:27:55 Yeah. So the beauty about tree is we bypass the conscious mind and the cognitive mind. So we use simple exercises where we’re fatiguing the muscles. So most of the time because it’s the easiest, we have people lying on the floor with their legs in like a butterfly position. We’re holding the knees up against gravity. Now, just about all of us have experienced those little shakes and tremors you get. If you’re at the gym and you’re holding a weight that’s a bit heavy, or you’re in a yoga pose and you’re holding it for longer and you start to get the trembling. So we call that a postural tremor, and we use that. But instead of saying, oh, that’s a sign of weakness and it’s time to stop the exercise, we just hold that position and the body starts to generate these movements, first of all, based upon the fatigue in the muscles.

Richmond Heath 00:28:41 And it’s not hard for t like, you know, if you hold your arm out straight, I think, my body’s not moving. But at a muscle fiber level, all those muscle fibers, the way they’re creating that stability is they’re contracting and relaxing so fast that I can’t feel any movement. But even at that muscular fiber level, the body’s already trembling or trembling. And so by holding that, and when the shaking starts, we just allow that. And then as the shaking starts to occur, then we say, okay, now let’s take volitional control of the movement again. So we’ve got that part of our brain that can stop that movement so that people learn, I can allow this shaking to happen, but I can also turn it off. Hang on. I can control this shaking mechanism. And so once people get that sense of, oh, I can stop and start this, then it becomes much easier for them to relax and allow it and allow their body to just take over. So people use this fatigue to connect to what we call the neurogenic.

Richmond Heath 00:29:36 Or I like the term auto genic tremor. And by that we mean this is a movement that the body is generating not because of muscle load. So yeah, if I hold a bucket of water up for an hour, my body is going to shake. If I plank for an hour, my body is going to shake because it’s being asked to create and meet this huge load. But the example I love is if anyone’s ever been in public speaking, or you’ve seen someone in public speaking and their hands are shaking and their voice is a little bit trembly, that’s got nothing to do with muscle fatigue. The system is generating that response and the shaking is not part of being anxious. This is really clear. Someone’s public speaking in their hands are shaking. Yes, they’re anxious about public speaking, but the shaking is not helping their body to fight. It’s not helping their body to flee. And it’s not helping their body to immobilize. The shaking has got nothing to do with anxiety. It’s the body trying to down regulate anxiety, to use up the adrenaline through movement.

Richmond Heath 00:30:33 You know, adrenaline doesn’t cause shaking. Adrenaline is there to create the energy for movement. The shaking is when they’ve got too much adrenaline and the body’s trying to get back to a homeostatic balance. So with the technique where we use the muscle fatigue, the key thing is people learn that they can regulate it themselves. I can turn it on, I can turn it off. So I can now use this response on my own. And then once we’re doing that, the key thing, one of the key terms for me and our technique is follow the body. So once the body starts shaking and trembling, instead of it being, oh, I need to make a go to my shoulder, I need to do it. This and I start to lead it with my ego again, is learning how to follow the body all right? My left hip seems to want to move now. I might move my leg to help that free up and shake more fully, but what we’re wanting to do is to let the organic wisdom of the body unwind itself in its own time, rather than us trying to do it, you know, therapeutically or imposing what I think the body needs to do.

Richmond Heath 00:31:34 and people who want to learn the technique and experience it during Covid. I was living just on the outskirts of Melbourne, the most lockdown city in the entire world, because I wasn’t able to work. But our Australian government had a scheme to sort of give people payments to keep us all surviving. So I wanted to do something to, you know, honour those payments and not just sit at home and do nothing, because my partner, who’s a physio, was going and working at nursing home, so she’s busting a gut and I’m always getting as much money as her. So I created a free online course for people to learn theory during Covid. Now at the moment, that’s still free. It’s going to be a user paid model in the near future. So if you’re interested in experiencing the technique, that course is at tra course.com or.com. It’s got three guided sessions where you can go through. And it’s so simple. And one of the difficulties we often have with our technique, Jessica, is people go, gee, it’s so easy.

Richmond Heath 00:32:33 We just tell people to hold your knees like this and then move them up and hold them longer, and then come into this parallel position. That often what happens is practitioners, they go, oh, I can teach my clients that, but they don’t understand everything else that’s going along in terms of teaching people self-regulation and the solidity and groundedness in my own system or as a provider, our providers systems, that’s helping people keep really safe so that courses there for your personal use. If you’re someone who’s thinking about going, oh, I’d love to share this with other people, then I always recommend don’t just go and tell people, because if they have a bad experience, they feel like they’re out of control and you can’t teach them well. They’ll go, oh, that was scary, and I’m never going to use it for the rest of my life. And effectively, it’s like you’ve just locked their emergency exit on their nervous system. Or if they have an experience which is not very impactful, they’re like, oh, I’ve got this little tremor.

Richmond Heath 00:33:23 It really didn’t do anything. They’ll go, I’ve tried to it didn’t help. And so people miss out. So I always recommend, you know, if you’ve got someone who you think is going to really benefit from this technique, either send them off to that course or. Of course. Com or through the global website trauma Prevention. Com you can find Tra providers all around the world. So it’s like if people really need it and they’re going to benefit from them, get it. Get them to someone who’s going to be able to teach them really well. So they have a great experience. They feel safe and controlled and it’s really effective.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:54 Can we use this in telehealth in a group model, or is it best one on one?

Richmond Heath 00:33:59 So again, this is part of the reason why I’m so passionate about tree is when David Beasley first designed it again, working with in war zones and mass scale disasters, part of the impulse is saying we can’t keep only working in a therapeutic one on one model.

Richmond Heath 00:34:17 You know, when the tsunami came through in what I can’t remember, that was 2008 or whatever, you know, we haven’t got 5000 million psychologists to send into an area to do 15 sessions with every person over 12 months. So we need to help people heal and evolve themselves. And so this is where the origins of Tara was not about a therapy whatsoever. It was about empowering people in their own healing and giving them this birthright knowledge that this recovery response is inside them. So it’s wonderful to use in a group setting again, because I don’t need to be therapeutically there. I’ve just got to teach you how to switch the tremors on, how to turn them off so you can regulate it. So I know, you know, groups of up to 100. I know David’s work in groups of up to 300 people. The limitation really is the size of the room. So it’s an extremely cost effective process again. And rather than it being how you need to come back to me for repeat business, and that’s my business model.

Richmond Heath 00:35:16 It’s very much about, hey, we need to give you this technique and empower you with this skill so you can go home for the rest of your life and use it on your own. We’re here as therapists because we can do a lot to help the body free up more and help you access it and integrate it more fully and freely. So it’s not saying, you know, there’s no role for the providers. But yeah, group models are wonderful because it makes it cost effective for people. The other great thing is similar to seeing when we trim it together in a group. Our physiology is resonate and often amplify and move in ways that we don’t experience on our own. So, you know, similar to if you’re singing in the shower, it sounds great acoustics in the bathroom. But if you sing in a group, not only do you have your own amazing tremor, but you start to experience harmonics, which is an additional note that you can’t actually create on your own. And the similar thing often happens in group environments.

Richmond Heath 00:36:08 And because we don’t necessarily need to talk about things, for example, I use the term debriefing the body. So, you know, if you work in a I don’t know, you know, say you’re a fire war, not a word. And I don’t know what you call them in the US, but, you know, say you’re a firefighter and you’re part of a team and there’s this mass incident, you’ve got 150 firefighters have all been through this traumatic experience. The traditional models are now guys, we’ve either got to go and talk about it. We’ve got to go and see the counselors, and we’ve got to do that one on one, or we’ve got to just go to the gym and pump weights. Whereas in a situation like that, you can have 150 people on the floor all together or in their little units of ten back at the station, lying on the floor trembling, some that are talking about what happened while that’s happening, other people just just in their own space, letting their physiology unwind it so that at the end of their shift, instead of going home, going, oh my God, I had a terrible day.

Richmond Heath 00:36:58 I’ve got to contain that and hold my body so I don’t traumatize my partner and my kids. People go, oh, well, my physiological responses to that experience are I’ve fallen away. So it’s an incredibly empowering tool. And this is where we actually start to train the neurobiology of resilience. We’re training our body’s capacity to let that response go. So in the initial days you might go, yeah, I’ve done a tremor. I feel really good, but it’s still bothering me a little bit over time in a healthy organism, the most healthy system. And this comes out of the book Why Zebras don’t get ulcers. Robert I can’t remember how to pronounce his name, but this fantastic thing where the healthiest systems, the healthiest organisms, healthiest zebras, the healthiest humans we have, the biggest stress response. All right, we all think it’s the lowest. No. So what it means is when is the stressor, whether it’s mild, whether it’s a person, whether it’s financial, whether it’s whatever. The healthiest system mounts a huge response to that.

Richmond Heath 00:37:59 But it then very quickly shuts it back off. And part of the whole process around a lot of autoimmune is that it’s like chronically stuck on doesn’t switch off or it’s not being activated in response. So rather than thinking, oh, or not.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:13 Enough or.

Richmond Heath 00:38:13 Not enough, that’s right. And so rather than thinking, oh well, I’m meant to be calm and chilled out and I never get stressed and reactive. The healthiest system will mount a big quick response, and then it will turn off really quickly again. And so this is where using the tremor mechanism in a group setting is ideal, so that we’re training the capacity for the body to switch off. One of my friends explains it a little bit, like with exercise, he says going to the gym doesn’t make your heart healthy. If you go and do cardio. It’s the drive home from the gym. And what he means by that is if there’s a big, loud noise, all of our systems, instantly our heart rate will go up to 150.

Richmond Heath 00:38:53 We never lose the capacity for that response to happen, but what we lose is the ability for the body to go, oh, that was just a car backfiring, you know, shut down being within five seconds, my heart rate’s back to 100, you know, back to 60 or 70 or whatever. Or that same thing of, oh my God, I’m feeling anxious about my financial situation or my health or my children’s health. Hang on. Can I do anything? No. Switch off, come back to calm. And so this is where the repeated use of the mechanism we’re training our system to get back to easily and efficiently, you know, get back to a more calm, relaxed, homoerotic style. And that’s not just consciously, oh, I’m feeling okay today. My back is not hurting, but below the level of the surface of the iceberg where we’re going. That chronic tension in my pelvic floor that was there for 40 years that eventually catches up with us with, you know, sciatic joint problems and lower back problems and whatever else, bowel cancer.

Richmond Heath 00:39:50 But I didn’t know that until it had a secondary effect and that chronic bracing and holding them had a, you know, a chronic illness sort of effect. So this is where when we go into the body, we often find, well, there’s all this stress and tension that I never knew about. I don’t have a story for it. I don’t necessarily even have any emotions around it. But my physiology is bound up. And because we’re so intellectually, mentally, you know, Egotistically sort of focused in the Western world where generally so disconnected from these patterns in our body that we don’t realize. So this is where being able to teach people in a huge group environment, it’s just so cost effective, it’s magic. And then for me, one of the great benefits of Covid was people starting to teach this technique by the live online in telehealth, which worked really well. Obviously, there are things we can’t do in terms of hands on supporting the tremors and facilitating and deepening the process, but in terms of people learning it and doing the basics and learning how to use it themselves, telehealth works wonderfully.

Richmond Heath 00:40:49 In that free online course I told you about, you know, that’s had 12,500 people who are going in there and learning it on their own. And again, that’s my real passion is rather than even saying, hey, you need to do a telehealth session with me and it’s one on one, you can go and learn this technique. You can learn the basics. Anyone in the world with access to the internet can go and learn the basics. Start using it, and then if you need help and support, go and find a true provider or a clinician who can help you understand it and deepen the process.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:41:17 Excellent. Thank you so much for your time.

Richmond Heath 00:41:20 You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:41:26 I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I think there’s one key takeaway for me about that whole conversation and listen to every minute of it. We say in our seven step system, the nervous system is step one, but rarely do we have a tool that gets so directly to the physiology that can be used, even if someone doesn’t have a deep intellectual understanding of it.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:41:56 It doesn’t have to feel hard. It can be integrated into their regular movement routines, their exercise routines, into their Pilates class, into their yoga class. And the key thing is to be sure that they feel safe to allow this traumatic release, no matter what that brings up for them. Tears, memories, things they have to talk through anger or other emotion. So that’s the whole key as we allow for this trembling and shaking and the trauma is released, things will come with it. And I have seen this many times in my pelvic rehab practice. We have to be ready for people to experience their emotions moving through, and that’s not something we’re generally comfortable with in Western medicine. So the more we can create safe space around that for people to do at home via telehealth sessions in groups in your practice one on one. This is such a wonderful opportunity, this tool, and I strongly encourage you to reach out to Richmond and learn more about this work. Try it for yourself and let me know how you feel, how it’s helping for yourself and for your practice.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:22 Thanks so much for joining me today on the Integrative Women’s Health podcast. Please follow, subscribe, share with your colleagues. The bigger the podcast audience grows, the more followers and subscribers we have, the bigger and more fascinating the guests get. And we’ve already had many, many, many phenomenal guests and I can’t wait to bring you even more. See you next time. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients. Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.