Trama is a really important area of discussion today in the field of medicine, specifically because many therapies designed to treat trauma are now emerging from a somatic or body-based perspective. I mean, the just groundbreaking bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vendorkog has been one of the books that's been really going viral for lack of a better word within the field of, I guess, healing from trauma and PTSD. I'm not quite sure the exact niche, but that is very interesting to me because it resonates with some experiences I've had both as a patient and with my patients that I wanted to share here today. Hey guys, Dr. Alex Heine, Chinese Medicine Doctor and author of the health book Master the Day on Amazon. I've included a link right below this video in the description box there and it's for a free guide which is four daily rituals that can help you live longer with traditional Chinese medicine. You can check it out down there below as well as a link to my clinic. Now, I wanted to share a few experiences I have that I've had as a patient as well as that I've had with my patients that has made me really think about the nature of emotions and trauma as well as healing. So the first experience I had was when I was in intern in school and I was doing this body work exercise called Qi Gong Tuan Na which is basically a very, very gentle, facial stretch for lack of a better word where you hold the patient's hand like a handshake and you just gently squeeze and then gently release. Your lengthening and your compressing. What I found is that it's a fantastic kind of somatic therapy for people with nervous system issues going on. So you could think of anxiety and depression, stress as a nervous system problem as well as many other things. But specifically when there's really something that's bothering a person. Now the first time I did this was with a patient and after doing this for five or ten minutes she just broke down crying and I was like what's going on? What's coming up? And she said I don't know, I just felt it coming up and she had a huge release and felt amazing after that. And I had that many more times with students and even now with my patients it's happened many, many times. Now the second experience I had that was profound in school was one time I was working with the patient at the end. I just did a gentle suboxypital hold. In the base of her skull I just put my hands under and help them there. I didn't do anything besides put my hands under her head and instructed her to just really relax and not try to do anything like let the head get heavy. And again sure enough, after a few minutes she just started crying. And I repeated this on many, many, many patients and sometimes they wouldn't tell me but I came in and I could see the tear streaks in their makeup or the tear streaks in their face or their glassy eye and it got me thinking about the nature of emotional or psychological or psychic healing in a mystical sense but in the old way that these kind of youngians or Freudians would say psychic healing as is that which pertains to the psyche. So I like to think of trauma, whatever box you want to put that in as almost like these somatic scars. Where if you have a traumatic experience or something that induces PTSD it almost leaves an imprint on your physical body. Now I know in our culture we've been trained to believe that emotions are primarily with your brain or anxiety, depression, mental health is mental. I strongly vehemently am opposed and it's just, I'm mainly against this idea because the problem is if you believe it's all in your head you try to just treat it with cognitive based therapies, i.e. thinking. And yet even with my own patients the most effective interventions I found they can do on their own regarding anxiety and depression are somatic. They're not cognitive, they're not journaling, they're not talking about it. It's anything that puts them in their body, whether it's exercise, physical touch, somatic therapies like acupuncture and bodywork. That I found to be some of the single most effective therapies for a lot of these conditions. Now Bessel Vendorcoat coming back to that author talks a lot about using somatic therapies to deal with traumatic experiences as well as how the body holds these stored emotions. And if you want to see something really interesting, look up videos on trauma stretching or trauma release therapy for war veterans or Vietnam veterans or Iraq war veterans. You're going to see some really really interesting things that I think are absolutely fascinating. So I think the big point of this video is just we have to as a culture go beyond this idea that emotions are just neurotransmitters, it all occurs in your brain, memories are just stored in your brain. So you just need to talk with a therapist 10 hours a day, take an outfit of pressing, take a Xanx and you're all good. And your reality doesn't really work like that for so many patients. And even if you want to do that, fine. But I found that combining it with a somatic therapy, involving your body, whether it's trauma release, whether it's yoga, whether it's acupuncture, whether it's literally just sitting down and like, how am I actually feeling? Where do I feel sensation in my body? Tree training that faculty is often the most effective healing modality for lack of a better term that I've seen with my own patients. So just my two cents for the day, something I thought was very interesting, having seen it with my patients, how acupuncture sometimes releases these emotions in a safe way that people feel so much better after. They don't feel sad, they just cry and they feel better. They don't feel like they're going to win the lottery, but they start spontaneously laughing 10 minutes later, they feel better. And it's very mysterious to me, but it's pretty amazing for the patient. All right, you guys? So that's what I have for today. If you'd like to look at my patient of mine locally or online via telemedicine, the link below this video is a link to contacting my clinic. You can set up an appointment that way or email me for more info. Now, otherwise, I have two related videos on this topic here.