Feeling SAFE to heal and the Body’s Internal Sensory Arrays

Dr Pedram Shojai

Pedram breaks down the science of internal sensing and makes clear why feeling safe is such a critical part of healing and recovery. Tune in and learn on this nerdy episode!

Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.

Podcast transcript:

Dr Pedram Shojai: [00:00:00] Welcome back Urban Monk, Dr. Pedram Shojai, solo this week. I got a couple of guests coming next week, uh, have been busy producing the new course called Sanctuary. It’s awesome. It’s been several months of research, uh, a lot of thinking about how to best. couch information that’s going to serve my students without overwhelming with more information because there’s just such a glut of stuff you think you ought to know out there.

Um, don’t want to be part of that, but I also need to make sure people are hearing what they need to hear about what. is potentially harmful to them, their family, their children, their pets. And so this new course called Sanctuary is a very comprehensive. It really helps you understand how to turn your home into a Zen healing oasis and how to look forward to coming home, recovering, healing, and not feeling like you.

Always got to go find another way to fill the tank, whether it’s [00:01:00] massage, acupuncture, chiropractic, whatever it is, we self medicate and we look for these healing oases outside. But you know, the 150 bucks here, the 200 bucks there, the 3, 000 vacation there, it all adds up, but it doesn’t solve the problem. So let’s look at how you would solve.

Some of these problems at home so that the place you call home becomes the place you get what you need. Uh, long term you end up adding value to the asset. You end up spending less money running around trying to find. Palliative fixes for the problems that you have ongoing and home starts to feel better and better.

You start to have more energy, start to have more vitality and more enthusiasm. Uh, and that goes a long way. So this week I wanted to share, there was a talk I did at the eudaimonia summit a couple weeks ago, covered some, uh, really interesting stuff that I hadn’t talked about in any of my academies. My students were like, please share it here.

And I thought it was important enough to say, you know [00:02:00] what, let me go share this a little more broadly. I’m going to put this on the podcast just because. I think it’s important for you to hear what I’m about to share. I think that this is a very important time and inflection point in our understanding of health, our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of how things actually get fixed and you learning how to manipulate your environment and your biology In a way that can help you feel safe, biologically, neurologically, physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, a lot of levels there, um, will allow for this thing called healing, which has been so elusive.

So I’m going to, I’m going to jump right in cause I got a lot to, to share and I think it’s really important again, for you to understand safe. is how we need to go to heal.

So the problem [00:03:00] with healing is the problem that most of my patients had in that they wanted me to do something. and say, fix me doc and come in and get their fix and go back out to the lives that they lived. And the degree of allostatic load, which is what I want to talk about, uh, wasn’t getting lessened.

And so there’s only so much you can do to dig out if you’re constantly creating more problems. And That’s kind of Lifestyle 101, right? Allostatic load, if you don’t know the term, is all about the immediate impact that certain things have on your physiology, on your body. Elevated stress hormones, elevated inflammatory markers, disrupted metabolic function, compromised immune response, and reduced generative capacity are the immediate impact of this load being put on the body.

And what does that do to the body? Right? It has physiological [00:04:00] costs. It leads to mitochondrial dysfunction, which means, man, you can have less energy. Cellular aging, acceleration, you’re aging faster. Telomere shortening, same thing, same kind of principle. You’re aging faster. More damaged DNA, tissue degeneration, and it starts to overload , the system in very meaningful and negative ways, right?

It crushes the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. It creates autonomic imbalance, which we’re going to talk about. Metabolic disruption all around. It exhausts your immune system and it strains your cardiovascular system. So, whoa, don’t want that. Right. And we are swimming in it, right? What contributes to this is chronic psychological stress.

Whoops. Check that box. Sleep disruption. Whoops. Again, [00:05:00] poor nutrition, environmental toxins. chronic inflammation, ongoing infections and physical overexertion. Yes, that means crushing it in your HIT class when you weren’t ready to do so. And so there’s some really bad long term consequences. And folks, this isn’t new stuff.

This is why people end up in clinics, right? You’re going to have less resilience to stress. Obviously your healing is going to get impaired. And we’re going to talk about why, uh, in a minute. You’re going to age. in an accelerated fashion, and you’re going to have increased disease risk, ? Obviously you’re beat up, you’re worn down, your immunity isn’t working, you get sick more often, right?

And then your recovery is slow. So the challenges are many when it comes to allostatic load. And this again is what drives people into the clinics. around the world. And you know, when I did this talk, um, I asked the room, [00:06:00] Hey, how many of you folks came from the medical system and were failed by some doctor and, , are over here in this, conference trying to get well, you know, a lot of their hands go up and how many of you are trying biohacking and all sorts of things that are, you know, kind of new and gestalt and innovative to try to feel better and stayed up.

Now, Keep your hand up. If you still have the issues that you came in with, and there may be a little better, but you’re still dealing with them. Whoops. When you have allostatic load like this, especially women, and you start doing some of this aggressive biohacker dude stuff. It adds to the allostatic load, adds to the burden and it can break you.

And that’s why I thought it was really important to share this on the podcast. You have to, in order to recover, you got to reduce the stress. You got to get sleep. It’s the opposite of all the things that led to it, right? You got to eat well. You got to protect yourself, uh, from toxins in the environment.

You got to bring down inflammation through diet and [00:07:00] practices like mind body practices, which bring down NF, NF kappa B and make you feel better. You got to support your mitochondria. So you juice up the energy systems that then allow you to kind of turn the system back on. . And this is always contrasted with this thing called hormesis, right?

Which is this kind of positive adaptation that we want. In the ice baths and the saunas and, you know, the HIT training. And so this is what all the biohackers are always talking about, right? Like these brief exercise challenges, intermittent fasting, you know, hot, cold, , messing with oxygen, whether you’re varying it, you’re doing more oxygen or you’re going hypoxic to train a phytochemicals, you know, a lot of the botanicals out there are phytochemical stress.

They’re really bitter. They’re really aggressive. They get the body to do something. And also all the, the breathing stuff, right? The Tumo, um, a lot of the Qigong is controlled breathing practices that will help the body say, okay, let’s grow, right? These are all wonderful things. Should you [00:08:00] be ready for such training for such behavior?

So, , When you do it and you do it right and your body’s ready for it, you have mitochondrial biogenesis. Yes, that sounds good. Enhanced antioxidant systems. So your body is starting to enhance its ability to use these antioxidants to bring down the free radicals in your body. , you have improved protein quality control, which means you’re now producing better stuff in this body.

That’s happy. Your DNA is repairing better. You have better resilience against stress and your cell membranes get strong, On the positive side, it keeps going is look, your insulin sensitivity gets better. You start burning fat better. You have better efficiency on your energy and your energy consumption.

You have better metabolic flexibility. Oh, I’m starving. I’m hangry. No, you’re not. And so it’ll help you in a lot of ways, not in the least the enhanced [00:09:00] stem cell function.

You have stem cells hanging out in your red marrow. When you start doing hormetic stressors correctly, you get better tissue repair, you get better immune response, you get stronger resilience, right? So the challenge though, is dosing. The challenge is recovery time. You don’t ice bath twice a day. You don’t ice bath every day.

The challenge is also progressive phasing of this, right? If I did a lukewarm ice bath and, um, stop there, I’m not getting it. I got to go a little colder every week and eventually, you know, get down to really, really freezing, but I got to progress so that my body is saying, Oh yeah, he’s still challenging.

So you got to vary it up. You have to make sure you’re backing what you’re doing with proper nutrients. So your body grows and then yeah, the payloads there, you get increased longevity, better stress tolerance, enhanced performance, improved healing, greater resilience. Love it. Yes. Sign me up. Except if I have too much allostatic [00:10:00] load and this is where balance becomes a dance.

You have to notice when you are not. making progress. If you’re tired, if your sleep sucks, your mood is out, your wounds aren’t healing. You’ve been sick for a week and a half. It’s just not going better. Your digestive issues are always there. You’re always sore. Your muscles are always sore. Your appetite goes up.

So you are either not getting enough challenge or you’re getting too much challenge. So what you want is temporary fatigue followed by energy rebound, right? What you want is better stress tolerance, better mood, Better sleep and all these things. So you take a little hit and you get better. You take a little hit and you get better.

But if you’re doing all this stuff and that’s not happening. your allostatic load is probably too high to be messing with the biohacker bro stuff. Okay. And this is where I just want to make sure [00:11:00] my listeners are safe. Um, there’s easy ways to monitor this. You could, you know, check your sleep quality on your aura ring, your heart rate, you know, monitor your energy levels, your mood, your spouse will tell you, um, your recovery time.

I was sore for . five days after that workout. Well, it’s probably too long. Your performance markers. What’s your box jump? What’s your, mile time. There’s a lot of ways you can know if things are improving or not. Um, and your tissue healing just being one, your immune response being one and overwhelm being something that I just always caution my patients to keep an eye on because you don’t want to be overwhelmed when it comes to this hormesis equation and you don’t want to be underwhelmed.

You just want to be whelmed, right? And so how do you do that? in a wellness environment that is trying to get everyone to biohack and cut corners when the allostatic load is still too high. Now, the challenge is when you [00:12:00] have too much allostatic load and cortisol levels are high, your stem cell activity gets blocked and then you are not able to heal.

You are not able to move in the right way. And when you have too much allostatic load, you start to really mess with the safety signaling of the body from the inside out. The body saying, I don’t feel safe. I don’t have enough to make ends meet, whether it’s in nutrients and minerals in energy, in sleep. I just don’t feel like I can do this.

And I shut. Now the things that do this, That are very popular in the media, obviously, is cortisol and stress, right? Has direct tissue effects, it blocks the stem cell activity, it gets you to be fat, it suppresses your immune system, it increases protein breakdown, your muscles start wasting, your glucose dysregulates.

I mean, all the stuff that we know about cortisol that sucks. Um, and it reduces [00:13:00] anabolic processes, right? You work out till the cows come home, you’re not getting buff. As we start to look at this, and this is where I just want to be careful that you listen, is with stress and cortisol, your mitochondrial function goes down.

Energy is the currency of life. So you start to make your body feel unsafe. The stress and cortisol then say, power down, there’s something wrong with this animal. Your oxidative stress goes up. You start losing your ability to sleep well. You start reducing growth hormone, your tissue remodeling goes south, your brain repair goes south, your , bone formation, I mean, all these things that you need going for you go south with this stress and cortisol.

We kind of understand that, right? But the part that’s really important to understand is this, Elevated cortisol has direct correlation with blocking stem cell activation. TNF alpha, IL 1B, particularly those two have [00:14:00] inhibitory effects. They will keep your blood pressure down.

Stem cells from healing your body. They will keep you from having the healthy recovery you need in a life. That’s so full of stuff coming at you. Okay. And there’s obviously a lot of lifestyle stuff, you know, gut permeability, increases inflammation, environmental toxins. The devil, we know increases all sorts of inflammation, right?

Uh, losing sleep. Oops, I couldn’t sleep because I wasn’t well, but now I’m not sleeping becomes a negative toilet flush and you end up getting yourself into a lot of trouble because the systems of the body can’t recover and it keeps going down from there. So there’s a lot that has to do with how we feel safe.

And I’ve talked about this before, so I’m not going to talk about this point a lot is endotoxemia. is a big deal. , a good percentage of the population has it. What is it? [00:15:00] It’s intestinal permeability, which means the tight junctions of your gut are not able to keep the bad guys out.

The bad bacteria, the sugar loving, uh, bacteria, the gram negative bacteria that, that live in our guts start to thrive. They produce these lipopolycasaccharides, they jump. Through these tight junctions, the body says, Oh man, what is this? Three bell alarm. I’m under stress. I have an allostatic load. I cannot grow, move forward and feel safe because there’s obviously something attacking me.

Same thing if you’re breathing diesel fumes.

These toxins, they really mess with the clock genes. They really mess with the body’s circadian rhythms. Now you’re not sleeping. Oops. You’re not healing. So this becomes kind of a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself because these clock genes, they tell your body when it’s time to rise, when it’s time to go down, when it’s time to detox.

Uh, there’s a bunch of them, clock, BMAL1, PER, [00:16:00] CRY. And what they do is they regulate your metabolism in a way that has. An ebb and a flow and disruptions in this really start to mess with your ability to run the show correctly.

And all this zaps our energy. All of this tells our mitochondria that something isn’t safe and we need to power doubt. And so when we have signals in our body that are pro inflammatory, that are saying something ain’t right, we got to hunker down. What it tells our mitochondria to do is conserve resources, prioritize survival, power down and reduce energy expenditure and let’s preserve critical resources.

for essential functions only. And because mitochondria have a lot of activity that kick out a reactive oxidative species, ROS, what this does is it says, look, there’s already a [00:17:00] lot of damage around here, so let’s not create any more. Let’s just turn down the smoke stacks here.

And what that does is is it starts to retrograde signal to the nucleus and it activates a cellular stress response program. And then the whole cell starts saying, okay, we’re in survival mode. Like we’re not spending right now. Let’s hunker down. I don’t know what’s happening. Right. You can see it’s a very, very similar to how the economy works in a lot of ways.

Right? So then we go into power down repair mode. We try to clear damaged proteins. We try to reorganize and we go into defense As a priority cellular defense. Okay. And so what this does is it starts to tell your body to conserve energy. What is , the readily available form of energy that your body knows how to conserve?

Huh? Comes in the form of calories and we store it as fat. Oops. [00:18:00] Okay, so I want you to understand that all of these problems that everyone’s complaining about coming into the clinic all tie in somehow to this very simple equation of your mitochondria saying it ain’t safe. And when it does so, it basically creates a moat.

Not just around the energy production of your life, but it creates a moat around your life. Okay, these cellular stress sensors, they trigger protective response. They help cells weather the stress, they prevent excess damage, but they go into board up the windows mode. Right? That’s not when you’re enjoying your view, is it?

 And so you’re less efficient. But you’re risky in your energy production. You’re safer in your energy production, but you have lower output. This is how 90 percent of my patients live. And this is why there’s not enough energy in the system to [00:19:00] push them over the top and heal. And this is why I thought it important to share this here, because look, biohackers are just telling you to go for it.

And people are hurting themselves. We talk about this in functional medicine all the time, you know, fight or flight or rest and digest. Right. And so that’s sympathetic nervous system activation versus parasympathetic. We get that. But in psychology, we also have a very similar concept of discover mode versus defend mode.

The kid who grows up in a safe environment and is well fed and nourished and loved shows up and they’re just like, yay, college. And this. Kid that’s in the same grade who grows up with higher ACE scores, psychoemotional trauma, all sorts of issues around them. They might not be able to cross over and they are in defend mode like, Oh, the world’s coming at me.

What do you think’s happening in the mitochondria of one organism versus the other? Where is that switch and how can we [00:20:00] find it in our own bodies? And so what I wanted to share with you is, and again, there’s nothing here beyond just helping you understand what science has moved a little bit.

So this data stream, we’re so excited about our gadgets. Oh, my ring told me this, my watch told me that my, computer told me it’s time to snack. And so we’re, we’re very up on these. external data sources. I have two monitors in front of me. I got a phone over there, a iPad over there and my laptop in the other room.

And so those sources of data coming in have become the acceptable format. But what about the ones we’ve forgotten? And this is where I want to spend a few minutes because I think this is really important. We have a variety of formats of sensing and some of which you probably have heard of, some of which you’ve obviously heard of, and some of which I think are going to come to you as a surprise and they’re going to feed into why I think it’s [00:21:00] important to turn your attention inward.

I’m gonna start with the easy one, right? Exteroception, external sensing. Got five senses, touch, sight, sound, smell, taste. And all of these bring data in, but then there’s this predictive processing that will also feed data up and down. Say, well, I expected that to be hot. Well, you know, I expected that to taste disgusting because I predict, so and so’s food is always disgusting.

And so there’s all sorts of data going up and down, not just from the receptors. on this extra reception, but our perception of it, that is information that we’re constantly processing and needing to come in. This to me is one of the most powerful places meditation can hack in immediately is grab one of these five senses and then bring the internal attention to it.

 The next one, which you’re probably also aware of, but to a certain extent is this introception. [00:22:00] Concept. And interception is internal sensing. The vagus nerve, 10th cranial nerve runs down, innervates all the viscera in your body. You hear that in all the, you know, docu series out there, but this allows for this information stream that is a two way street between your organ systems, your heart and your brain to feed information internally within this dynamic network of information processing.

So we have physical states like hunger, thirst, internal temperature, pain, muscle tension, fatigue. And then we have physiological processes that you could also hack into a little bit, mind you, is like heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, Bladder fullness, digestive activity, and certain inflammatory states, and then we move into the emotional states.

Stress levels, anxiety, arousal on the emotional level, [00:23:00] well being, different mood changes. Interception also covers some of the metabolic signals like your blood sugar levels. Oh man, I think I need to eat. Energy availability. Uh, you know, I don’t feel like going out. I just don’t have it in me. Your hormone levels.

A lot of that has to do with sexual desire too. pH balance. Your body can sense this. Your oxygen levels. And so all of this internal sensing is a network. That is crucial for the maintenance of this thing called homeostasis in your body. All of this internal sensing helps you trigger adaptive responses.

It helps you coordinate immune function, helps you regulate stress response, and it helps you influence behavior and decision making in your life. So is this a critical stream of data? Ah, yeah. When do we focus on this? Right? And so this to me, interoception becomes a [00:24:00] really powerful way of tapping back into the body’s intelligence through all of these data streams that are well known, right?

We haven’t even like, there’s probably a whole separate quantum section that we can, we can talk about, but not know much about right now. Our ability to influence our stress response is here. Our ability to regulate inflammation is here. is here. Our ability to coordinate immune activity to heal and to affect our mitochondrial function and say, nah, baby, it’s okay.

Stop crying. It’s safe. So you could turn the powerhouse back on all impacted and directly correlated with our introception. Super important. I just talked about it last in last week’s podcast with Dr. Sarah. This is just number two of the sections. We have more proprioception probably heard of it.

Positional sensing. So this one is something that can guide physical [00:25:00] recovery. It can dictate muscle tension. It absolutely affects tissue healing impacts movement. And it helps coordinate physical repair. And this is the one that we lose by sitting in an office chair. This is the one that we lose by having these long ass commutes all the time and not getting our bodies to wiggle our toes on the floor and send the data up.

This is the one I always talk about as well, about the flat earth, right? Not the weirdo kind, but the flat earth in terms of saying the ground under my feet is this tile slate, whatever it is. Um, but it’s flat. Right? Someone made sure. So I don’t fall. The walls are 90 degrees. I’m sitting in pretty much a box indoors, but that’s not how the earth is made.

And so the earth has all these contours and our shoes were moccasins if, if they were anything and they would conform to the earth changing under our feet and [00:26:00] sending all sorts of appropriate signaling as we’re trying to balance and keep our head up straight. As we started to walk in that information stream from toes and, and the bottoms of our feet all the way up to our brains and back became a powerful information highway, which we have cut off with our stagnant lifestyles and that is shutting down our ability to one of our, one of our, uh, sensing arrays

so turning this back on also brings a lot of intelligence back into the body. It’s important to talk about it again. I want to cover all these categories real quick. Nociception, pain sensing. Uh, this is one that if you’re in pain, you know very well about right? Physical pain, tissue jent. Physical pain, tissue damage, temperature extremes, chemical irritation, mechanical pressure.

 So, this is our ability to feel pain. I mean, we’ve [00:27:00] all got it. Um, you know, it’s your neck, your back, your anything, right? But it’s also a way to hack into some of these arrays, say with acupressure, with acupuncture, um, with using stretching to put tissue back where it needs to be and the good hurt of a massage.

But again, that good hurt of a massage and the pain that you were in and the pain you’re willing to tolerate in order to relieve what. It is that you went into relieve that falls under this other category of nociception, which again is an intimate part of your body’s sensory array that needs. To be leveraged and understood as a critical data stream.

Chronoception talk to the biohackers, talk about this a lot, right? Your circadian rhythms, your awareness of time, the perception of duration, right? Which changes, right? Hey man, man, it felt like we were there forever. [00:28:00] My God, I felt like we were there for three seconds. Okay. You were there at the same time.

Um, and your ability to sequence things in time. Um, also your, your daily biological cycles, you have an ebb and a flow. So chronoception is something that has also been hacked by being inside under fluorescent lights and not being exposed to the rising in the setting of the sun, not being exposed to the outside where there’s full spectrum light that then dictates the endocrine activity in your body that then Allows for this cyclical ebb and flow of your biological systems that have been here for hundreds of thousands of years to flow the way they should.

So when we take this array offline by staying indoors and using artificial lights and being under blue lights at night, again, it takes away one of the major areas. of our awareness and our consciousness being able to [00:29:00] turn inward and say, what is this? Okay. And I’m going to come back to this. It’s important point.

Um, the last one I want to talk about, and this is probably the most relevant is this concept of neuroception. And this is exactly what I was talking about at the top of our call here, safety sensing, the environmental safety cues, the social safety cues, the threat detection, the risk assessment. And so there is a powerful autonomic.

state impact when you are sensing unsafety in danger, it blocks regenerative processes. It increases inflammatory response. It suppresses stem cell activity and it diverts energy away. Healing. Can you tell me why this is a problem? If you’re also going to your naturopath and eating a bunch of supplements, wondering why you’re not feeling [00:30:00] better, neuroception I would argue is one of the very important reasons is because the cellular signaling is saying, I’m not safe.

I’m not safe. I’m not safe. Cause when you are safe, you’re repairing, you’re regenerating your immune systems, crushing it. And you’re able to recover. And I’ve mentioned this in my, my sleep talks all the time. What does it take to fall asleep? I got to trust that nothing’s going to eat this body. When I close my eyes, nothing’s going to come in and kill me.

Nothing’s going to come in and steal my stuff. Right? There’s a lot of trust in closing my eyes and shutting down, um, and allowing my body to go offline in this place called sleep. And so how does that happen? I have to hack the safety signaling in my environment and in my life so that there’s enough safety and my arousal is below the line so I can sleep.

Okay. So [00:31:00] the point I would like to make here. is that you have to balance these systems and you have to bring some of these systems that you’ve cut out in your life, whether it was society, the man, mom and dad, or just you being, you know, negligent of some of these things back into your life so that you can turn this internal array back on.

And this is where I argue for meditation. For mind, body practices, anything that can fold your attention inward and reestablish a conscious connection with a critical data stream that is your birthright, whether it’s the chemoception, whether it’s the proprioception, whether it’s the five senses or whether it’s the, what is that feeling in my gut?

God, am I [00:32:00] inflamed from the food that I ate? Am I feeling anxious from what she said? These are all signals. The problem with these signals and this is where I just want my listeners to get is that English is not how the body communicates. English is an interpretive code that I’m speaking in right now that then you take the words and you assign meaning and there’s all sorts of referencing that happens in the brain.

You say, Oh, I think he means this. That’s not how the body talks. So how does the body talk? The body’s going to talk to you in mild forms of anxiety. The body’s going to talk to you in insomnia. The body’s going to make you feel creeped out next to that guy over there. The body’s going to make you feel nauseous after eating that food.

This is signaling. Oh man, I’m so nauseous. What do you got? Okay. That could help. That’s a good remedial way of making the nausea go away. But the [00:33:00] better question is what just made me nauseous? What gave me that headache? Am I drinking enough water? Did I walk into a room and get the headache? Okay. What’s in the room?

And so this ability to turn our attention inward and to get really focused back on all of these critical data streams becomes the way. Of the person who wants to heal in a world where you’re told the guy in the white coat over there is going to mansplain your health to you or that 27 year old biohacker bro is going to tell your 55 year old aunt how to live her life and balance her hormones.

And the fake news is going to tell you the next miracle supplement that’s here to change your life. All you got to do is, you know, buy now. And so you’re surrounded by artificial constructs. In data streams that are not necessarily coming from the [00:34:00] most important wise part. of yourself. And the longer you leave those lines severed, the harder it is to tap in and be like, what did I miss?

So the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the next best time is right now. So I hope this helps. Um, some of this information is already kind of out there. People are talking about interception now and it’s like the new thing, but interception is a part. Of all of the “septions”, I would say, and I would like to bring forth this conversation.

I’m going to invite, , really smart people to come onto the show and talk about the different parts of this and help you understand how important it is for you to wake up to this internal language. because it’ll help you live healthier. It’ll help you live more mindfully. And probably most importantly, it’ll help you [00:35:00] listen to the body.

That’s been trying to tell you things years, if not decades. And the sooner you do, I’ve found the sooner healing can happen. The sooner you return the body back to this innate place of safety and respect, what do I mean by respect? I’m listening, I’m listening. What are you saying to me? I’m listening. The body then starts to relax.

The body then starts coming out of crisis mode. The mitochondria say, okay, well it looks like this one’s going to live. Energy output starts to increase, that available energy can go towards tissue recovery. It could go towards healing, it could go towards building muscle, being less hungry, burning more fat, and having more energy left over to live the life that you deserve.

But you have to make yourself feel [00:36:00] safe. Where does that start? To me, it always starts with looking inward and learning to listen. Hope this was helpful. Again, check out the new course. It’s called sanctuary. Just go to the urban monk. com under courses. You’ll see it. Uh, you could get the course, um, on its own and I highly recommend it.

Or you could just subscribe to the Academy and get all the courses plus live interaction, live calls. I have conversations with my people on a weekly basis about cool stuff. Um, I’m here to help. I hope this helped.

Thanks for watching!

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Dr. Pedram Shojai

NY Times Best Selling author and film maker. Taoist Abbot and Qigong master. Husband and dad. I’m here to help you find your way and be healthy and happy. I don’t want to be your guru…just someone who’ll help point the way. If you’re looking for a real person who’s done the work, I’m your guy. I can light the path and walk along it with you but can’t walk for you.