Burnout—it’s a silent epidemic, especially among healthcare professionals. But what if healing from burnout starts by tuning into the wisdom of your own body?
In today’s episode, I have Dr. Jeffrey Carter, a healthcare professional who has experienced burnout firsthand.
He uncovers how perfectionism, high-stress environments, and workaholic tendencies can lead to burnout and, more importantly, how somatic healing can offer a path to recovery and reclaiming balance in life.
In this podcast episode, Dr. Carter takes us through:
- His personal experience with burnout and how it impacts different professions.
- The link between healthcare stress, exhaustion, and burnout.
- How burnout affects relationships and daily interactions.
- His early life struggles with perfectionism and achievement.
- The dangers of using work as a form of escape/numbing mechanism.
- The importance of somatic practices to release tension and heal.
- How self-awareness and taking responsibility can help manage burnout.
- How support systems are crucial for healing.
And so much more!
Dr. Jeffrey Carter, MD, is a practicing Trauma Surgeon, Critical Care Doctor, and Integrative Medicine Specialist.
After four years of medical school and eight years of training in Trauma Surgery, Dr. Carter experienced physician burnout during his early thirties, and his health suffered as a result. He initially sought help through the traditional avenues with some success, but still, something was missing.
Ultimately, Dr. Carter dedicated himself to becoming healthy and found power in holistic therapies, which led him to study Integrative Medicine at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He became a Fellow of Integrative Medicine in 2023.
Dr. Carter believes in partnering with his patients in patient-centered care. This relational doctor-patient relationship produces the best outcomes. He is a Gold Humanism Society Inductee and has contributed to many publications, presentations, posters, and book chapters.
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Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at www.freeyoursoma.com.
LISTEN WHILE READING!
A: Hello, everybody, welcome to Free Your Soma Stories of Somatic Awakening and How to Live from the Inside Out.
Have you been feeling burned out or maybe on the verge of some kind of health crisis? Maybe you've been through this yourself a few times and been looking for ways that work to come out of that experience, to avoid that experience in the future.
I'm going to be speaking with Dr. Jeffrey Carter today about his experience with physician or healthcare worker burnout, as well as his experience in radiance my somatic education program over the last few months. And the way that somatics and being connected to our bodies and our ongoing inner experience can be a huge part of recovering your nervous system, your body and your sense of self. So stay tuned.
A: Every day, there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy and here is where you free your soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion and ultimately from fear to love.
A: Hi, how are you doing today?
J: I'm good. How are you, Aimee? It's good to see you.
A: I'm great. Yeah, we just saw each other yesterday when you came for a session. And now here we are on the podcast. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you and continue the things that we were discussing yesterday.
J: Yeah, me too.
A: Yeah.
J: I'm grateful to have done the radiance program or nearing the end of it and to, they asked me to come on and talk about something that has certainly been very impactful for my life and one of the biggest challenges that has been ongoing in my life for 15 years.
A: Wow, yes. And I have to say that this concept of burnout, and we're going to talk about it today under the framework of what it means for healthcare workers because you're a trauma surgeon and a doctor, but also other people who are listening to this who may not be involved in that field could probably definitely relate to some of the things that we're going to be exploring. So maybe a good question to start with here might be, how would you define burnout or what we're alluding to when we say burnout?
J: Yes, that's a really good question. I don't have a specific definition, and all the definitions that I've looked up in our healthcare worker literature, whether it be nurses' literature or physicians' literature, I've never found a definition that I think pinpoints the experience. And I think that's because the experience is so individualized for every person that's going through it. So it's very hard for me to have an exact definition.
I think that it is something that's not solely to healthcare workers. I think it's probably something that several people across several different industries experienced in 2024. But some of the things that we experienced are unique to our group because we are taking care of other people and have different requirements from our job than a lot of other people have. So I do think that it's something that's probably common in our fast-paced lifestyle across the board, across all modern society. But there are probably some specific things that will hopefully come up in our conversation that make this unique to us.
A: Yeah, well, first of all, as a healthcare worker and especially if we take, for example, the kind of work that you do, life and death hangs in the balance. There's a lot of responsibility as a first responder, as a nurse, or as a doctor to make decisions, life-changing decisions for people who may not be able to make those decisions because of whatever's going on with their physical body or their health.
So it is a pretty big deal. And when we have people who are exhausted, whose nervous systems are fried, who are living without proper sleep and their basic needs being unmet, and they're doing that for a long time, it has a devastating effect not only on their own lives and their physical bodies, but it affects the people that they're caring for and the industry and co-workers that they're involved with.
J: Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's on our well-being and how we interact with every other person in our lives, including the people at work, our patients and our family members. I mean, including the people that you just go get your coffee from. And it just made me think of something in my height of the various types of burnout I've had over my career.
I remember thinking the coffee person was always annoyed at me because I was just raring to go all the time. And so it literally affects every single person, that every relationship that we have affects.
A: Wow, yeah.
J: You know, I'll get into my own experience. And I think that I was a setup for burnout. So I've given this a lot of thought and I've gone through a lot over the past seven or eight years and working with my own relationship with my job. And yeah, so you asked about the definition.
And I think that one of the things that I would say that this comes from is the relationship that we have with our work. And a lot of times, because of those things you just mentioned, like the life or death situations and meeting people on the worst day of their life over and over and over and over and having to perform over and over and over and over with the poor sleep, with the not the healthiest food that we eat while we're on long shifts and all the other things, we create a relationship with our job.
And what I would say is that it's the manifestations in all the other parts of our life due to an unhealthy relationship with our career. And when I track my own experience, this goes all the way back to my childhood.
Like I was setting myself up for burnout as a young boy growing up in Florida because I was the oldest child. I was a little bit of a perfectionist. I was a big time people pleaser and not necessarily people pleaser, but I enjoyed achievement. I enjoyed the rewards I got from people like parents, coaches, teachers as I achieved. I also was in sports and have a competitive side. So all these things were nurtured in my childhood.
And then, you go through the various steps of life and you get to medical school. Now you're even a higher achiever and more competitive. And then you get into surgery, residency, and all that stuff just keeps getting amplified, amplified, amplified until there becomes a point that all your energy is aimed at this pillar of your life that you're protecting at all costs.
And that everything is pointed at, at least in my situation, I think for those of us having burnout, everything is pointed at achieved life as opposed to all the other things that are actually very meaningful. And as you put those things aside one by one, you really develop an unhealthy toxic relationship with the thing that is your career. I think that without being able to give it a precise definition, I think that that phenomena is at the heart of a lot of our struggle with burnout.
A: Right. Well, and also, I remember you kind of alluding to this at different times, like when you feel really competent and capable in one area of your life, it can be really easy to try to escape to that space when you don't feel so competent or capable, say in your interpersonal relationships or in other areas of your life and you don't feel that sense of personal safety in your body maybe. It's easy to want to go to where you do feel safe, which might be your job. I can accomplish something there. I can get recognition there. I can experience success.
I can experience that I'm valuable because I'm helping people. And that's kind of the trap of workaholic mentality where we're escaping to our job or escaping into our passion. And it's a way that's socially acceptable to do so because you're just being a successful doctor or you're just being a successful entrepreneur. And it's tied up, though, with your lack of safety in other areas of your life and your lack of feeling competent in other areas of your life.
J: So absolutely. It's a positive feedback. And then, in my particular situation, you have people coming to you all the time saying, oh, you saved my life. You saved my life. As I continued to address my own burnout, I actually began to, for a while, I didn't even like hearing that because I realized how that had pulled me into this toxic relationship with my career. And now I'm back at the point where I can just say thank you.
I mean, I'd say you're welcome or thank you or whatever if I get a compliment or it's things, but it's working in the emergency room, working as a surgeon, working as an ER nurse, working as an ICU nurse. Like these are all very dramatic things because there's life and death involved. And there's TV shows and movies and all this stuff that sometimes glorifies what we do.
But for me, it's just my job where I go to every day. And yeah, you really listened to me because what you were saying was like really hit the nail in the head. Like that's all accurate.
A: Yeah, yeah. And I think that what went, well, let's kind of go back a little bit. We met each other at this networking event, and we had a conversation. And in that conversation, I invited you to do some movements for your neck. And it was one of these moments where I'm sitting there talking to you. And I have these moments from time to time with people where it's like I'm telling you something, and I see little lights going off in your brain because this modality, right?
Hannah Somatics is something that you have been looking for. But you didn't know what to call it or what it was. You just felt inside that there must be some way to address this tension and this like locked up feeling that I'm having in my body. And then I'm describing what I do and you're picking up on it. You're picking up what I'm putting down.
And it was interesting because there was a few moments where I must have picked up what was in your field, too, or what you were experiencing because I was like explaining that people can carry emotions and memories and experiences in their body. And I just happened to say like they're carrying their divorce in their neck, and your eyes went wide and you're like, I'm carrying my divorce in my neck because that was the place that we were really feeling it at that moment. That was the air of your body that been talking to you really a lot, right?
J: Yeah. So in my experience, to get to that point where I met you, my own personal story is that I had become aware that I was burned out and that it was affecting my life in dramatic ways about six years prior to meeting you.
And is when I went through separation and divorce, and I had done a lot of work to build awareness around the situation I was in and honestly to empower myself to be responsible for my own burnout. Like not all of it is in. I'm not trying to say it's all in our control, and it's not just about self-care. I think there's so much more to it than just that. But what I could take responsibility for, I did. And I developed a lot of awareness around it and from like an emotional, mental, spiritual stamp when I'd done a lot of work.
And one of the things that I had realized through all these various forms of healing that I was doing and we can talk about some of those later, but one of the things I realized is no matter how much of that stuff I was doing, my body was still typed. And so I was looking into things like for yoga or for somatic work or body work. And it was just one of those things that I'd never actually, I knew my body was tight.
If you go back 10 years ago, I had no idea my body was tight. So I first had to develop this awareness around it. So then I'd been wanting to do something to relieve this and I did. I had done things like I'd gone to Reiki, I'd gone to massage work, I had done a little bit of yoga and various things.
I float tanks, like things that made help my body feel better. But all those things led to temper doing something to me to help me feel better. But I knew I wanted to on this in such a way where I was doing it for myself, but I just hadn't figured it out yet. So when I met you, and you really didn't do anything to me, you just, we talked about that.
You show me some brief movements to do that night. And I felt better if my muscles felt relaxed. And then the next morning I woke up with this idea like, wow, like that those things work, I feel relaxed here for the first time in a long time. And I did it myself, you just talked me through it. So I thought this might be the way that I can learn how to relax my body permanently without having to go for a massage or for Reiki or for other energy work or all the various things I had tried.
Like this might be a way, I can do it for myself. So that was my initial reaction to interaction.
A: Well, I mean, that's true.
J: Like, yeah.
A: Sorry, go ahead. What is that you said?
J: No, it's come true. I don't want to skip to the end. But I mean, it absolutely, the Hannah somatic work absolutely allows me, I love the session where we work together, but I'm ultimately responsible for this now, which is one of the keys, I think, to anyone that's addressing their burnout is we have to take responsibility for the parts that we can.
I think that the thing that's the number one thing is, and I just want to make sure to point this out, but before the end, so I'm going to do it now, is that healers across all centuries of human time, the number one thing was the healer healer, healer, healer, healer, position healer, thyself.
And these things, you find these things in all of our ancient traditions, you find them in Arirveda, you find them in Shamanic traditions, you find them in the Bible, you find them throughout all time is that the healer healed by self, and we just simply don't have that culture anymore. And you're not trained. There's not even an hour, maybe there is now, but when I was in medical school, there wasn't even an hour devoted to how to take care of yourself.
In fact, all the talk was how not to take how to push yourself harder, how to get more out of yourself, how to work while you're exhausted, how to do all these things that that ultimately break you down, how to be a martyr for your patients and all this stuff. And I think that this is at the heart of burnout is that we are not taking care of ourselves.
And interestingly, as we learn to take care of ourselves, we start performing better. And I don't want to say like there's some very great skills I learned, like I'm proud to be able to say that I can stay up all night if I have to. I don't think that's the horrible. I think that there's hard conditions and how to maintain focus even in the face of exhaustion. And I'm grateful to have acquired that skill. It's just I just want to use it all the time.
A: Right. You want to have freedom and choice. You don't want to be locked into that's the way that you live your life. And that's the way that you experience your body, just the way you want to be dynamic, have choice, have agency, choose to relax, and have your body know how to do that. You know, kind of going back to what you're saying, like, we don't live in a world or society that teaches people how to take care of themselves.
That is not a thing that we're taught. We're often taught how to basically get by and survive and, you know, do as much as we can to get as much as we can from the time that we have here, right, or from our job or from our whatever it is, right? And so it is a very big shift to, you know, make that choice to slow down enough to take care of yourself, to slow down enough to learn a new skill.
Because that's ultimately what you've learned in this program is you've learned a new way that's very, very effective to take care of your body and to actually connect with your body and be able to listen to what your body is saying to you, you know.
And to the credit of our kind of, you know, warrior-like society, like, and I can relate to that too, I started my career in Bikram yoga and, you know, that particular teacher, Bikram, kept us up all night. It was nine weeks. It was, you know, the room was 120 degrees, and we were supposed to stay in there for three hours doing this insane, you know, hyper bendy yoga, you know, it was brutal. And I learned a lot from that.
I learned a lot from teaching those kinds of classes. But at the end of the day, my body was super locked up as a result of it, you know, and that's my body. I don't know how anybody else's body would experience this, but my body got locked up.
And my being got really locked up too, you know, and it was very freeing to be able to explore an alternative way of living my life, which was instead of fighting my body and overcoming my body and pushing, pushing, pushing through, what it would be like to radically slow down and be really soft and gentle and see what kind of changes and shifts would happen if I was really tending to my body as if it was a little baby, as if it was something really precious and fragile.
And, you know, what, what would happen to my body and my consciousness that I did that, that's what we are invited to in this work. I mean, and it's not to say that now you have to be a big softie and not stay up all night and not, you know, do your job.
In fact, I'd love to, you know, explore how this work has allowed you to be able to handle more stress and handle those stressful things in a, in a renewed way. But it's now that now your body has an option. Now your back, your neck, your shoulders have an option to soften and relax. And you can tell when you're getting tight and you can do something about it versus just having that be the way that it is.
J: Yeah. 100%. And I'll reiterate again, just to hammer this point home, I love that I can do something about it.
A: Did you know that your muscles are holding on to thoughts, memories and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old, you're experiencing a buildup of tension from the life you've lived. Most people don't know this, but there is a part of your brain that can reverse and prevent chronic tension.
When you relax your muscles, you not only move better and regulate your nervous system, but you also free yourself from the grip the past has over your body. So you can live with freedom, confidence and enjoy your life now. How does that sound? Join me, Aimee Takaya, and discover what my clients are raving about at youcanfreeyorsoma.com.
J: You know, regarding the hardcore things, those types of things that were very meaningful in my recovery from this too, like at the height of my burnout, I actually weighed 245 pounds. I did not have one good relationship in my life, literally not one. And I was overall like just miserable. I think some of those more hardcore things, like I did some silent retreats and some pretty hardcore stuff that I needed a little bit of a hammer at that time.
But I don't necessarily need that hammer anymore, right? So like to wake me up to something I wasn't seeing, like I didn't have awareness around, I knew something was wrong. So I was willing to try anything to help me figure out what was wrong because I knew something was wrong.
Like I checked every single box that society or family or acquaintances that ever asked me to check, and I was, you know, miserable, like physically, emotionally, I was completely miserable. So those hardcore things like what we alluded to, I think of those things as like a hammer. And sometimes we need that just to crack the shell that we had, I would say actually the prison, just to crack the prison that we have created around ourselves. And so some of those things were extremely useful for me.
I needed that at the time. But now, like you said, it's been very enjoyable to to learn this practice that helps me feel relaxed in my body. And you asked about how it helps me with the stress of my job now. It helps immensely. First of all, like I mentioned this to you the other day, like first of all, our body takes in so much just to have an awareness around being able to live in a relaxed body allows me to absorb stress as it comes and let it pass.
And if it's so much that I feel a little bit outside myself or real heady, or just really revved up, I can I can go on from there. So that's the way the practice can help like almost as like a treatment, like as needed. And we'd say in medicine, the PRN treatment, like as needed, I would use the treatment. But in general, it just allows me to be more relaxed.
A: Right, more relaxed and not jumping immediately into fight or flight. And a lot of that does have to do with your body just getting better and better at the skill of relaxing.
You know, and we were talking about that yesterday. Like you are at like almost the end of the Radiance program. And you're kind of at the point where I really, you know, I aspire for all of my clients to get, which is that they practice this way of being and moving in their body enough that their nervous system starts making that the new normal being relaxed as the new normal, right, and then stress comes and you know how to come out of and go into your relaxation, which you just described. And not only can you do it, but you can do it efficiently.
You can do it in 10 or 15 minutes, you know, you can be having like a really stressful day, and your body can feel really tight and be screaming at you, and you can lay down, and in 15 minutes, you can take down the tension or the pain by a good 80%, if not more, you know, and that's that comes from practice. And that's why I designed the Radiance program to be half a year long.
You know, that's why it's an investment of time and energy is because you're learning a literal skill that you're going to have for the rest of your life. And it's so beneficial to be able to have again, that agency and that option to be able to have, you know, say about what happens in your physical body and that you don't have to hold on to, you know, all of the muscular conditioning and stress that you ever experienced, right?
And I want to go back to kind of what you were describing about your own burnout, because I do think that this was a very natural progression, like there's no mistake that you met me at the time that you did, where you'd already done all of this other kind of processing and healing work, right? You'd already done all this other processing and healing work. And then you come to the point where it's like your body and the tension in your body is the final frontier. How do we get your body to catch up with where your consciousness has been headed has been going, right? 100.
J: That was my own journey. But I will say that if, I think that if somebody could do it the other way too, like if somebody is out there and they are feeling burned out and don't know where to go, it's like you just need to start and inroads somewhere. Like I thought about this a lot, like, and you'll read this in various places that there's, to get to the top of the mountain, there's several different paths. My own path, somatics, came more towards the end.
But I think there would also be reasonable for someone to say, wow, you know, I'm burned out. I don't know where to start. I don't know where to go.
Just start somewhere. And if, and I did want to make sure to say this, if you're looking back on my own experience, that there were times that, honestly, it was dangerous. Like I didn't, frankly, I didn't even want to live at times that like it was so miserable that I'm very lucky, I had very good support. Like I had some friends that really took care of me and supported me through the really hard period of time.
If you are someone that is like really bad off, then I recommend the traditional routes. Like go see a therapist, go see anybody that can, that can help you think to take your first step. And I think that if somebody was experiencing just overall, it's a very trapped feeling. And you don't feel like you can get out of this, and you feel like you've signed up for this for life. And you just don't understand why things aren't going well. And your body feels horrible. I think starting with somatics would be a very reasonable way to start, start your own healing journey.
A: Yeah, any road in is going to be that right? A catalyst. Any road in
J: where you're taking responsibility, where you can empower yourself to take responsibility for the thing that you're trying to heal. And I think that's what they mean by heal or heal theyself. Like take responsibility. And as we take more and more responsibility, we begin to want to affect the systems around us.
Like you begin to want to help your, you begin to want to help those around you that are experiencing this because it's, I think it's, I honestly think this is a health crisis that we're not addressing enough because it does affect all of our patients, all of our family members, all of our children.
A: So yeah. Well, let's get real here with that for a minute. Can you describe to us some of the signs of burnout that you experienced that, you know, you're kind of talking about how when you are sustaining unsustainable levels of stress for a long span of time, you can start to behave or act in ways or do things that you would not normally that are outside, like, you know, what you've known as yourself or what you would expect yourself to do. Can you talk a little bit about some of the signs and symptoms of this, you know, this issue?
J: Yeah, I think it'll be different for everyone. But some of the very basic things is, one, if you're just feeling miserable all the time and you don't know why, like if you just wake up and you, and you don't feel well and you're, I guess a lot of it would be classified as depression if you went to a psychiatrist or if it's just dysthymia, like just literally not feeling well ever.
Like if you're if you're feeling like that, I think that's a big red flag. If you have insomnia, like I used to fall asleep at like 11 o'clock and wake up at two. And that was it for days. I mean, even on the days that I could sleep because I was so, you know, I never had a check, but I have a feeling I just had cortisol, like rent, you know, going through my body at all times.
And I was just in fight or flight constantly. So if you know what I mean by fight, or I know you do, but like if someone listening knows what I mean by fight or flight, like just literally feeling like you're you're revved up all the time that there's impending doom, like there's a feeling of impending doom constantly, you always think that something's going to go wrong.
And so that was a big sign. And because you're miserable all the time, then you can start using various numbing mode, working more, like it's someone of the things just working more and more and more, like as you a lot of people that are burned out and included, like as everything is miserable and your whole life is crumbling around this one pillar, you're getting rewards at work, your patients are actually sometimes having amazing outcomes, like you're you're killing yourself for this.
And so it doesn't really relate at first. And luckily, I never got to the point where it actually affected my performance at work, because I kept that so strong. I think, ultimately, that would crumble too. But that would be that's the last thing to go. Like, and some experiences of doctors that have nurses and EMS guys that have committed suicide, that thing never
A: went, like they protect their career, they died before they let that crumble. Like, and I know a few people that this this happened to. So you'll protect that literally at all costs. So I think if you notice yourself
J: Protecting your work like that, and to a place where it's everything else has become unhealthy, but you're doing really well there, that's a big red flag. For me, it was weight gain, other people might be weight loss, I don't think there's anyone specific this will lead to physical illness 100%. Like I had my blood pressure, this and oh, here's the thing, if you just don't care, like if you don't care about your health, and you don't care that you're you're miserable every day, but you don't care, and you're getting wins at work, like that's a big red flag.
Yeah. And so, like I would have nurses in the middle of the night check my blood pressure, my blood pressure was like 190. When I get it checked all the time, I was through the roof. And I went to see a doctor, and they prescribe me some medicine, I never even filled it. Like I just didn't, I just didn't care, like I was, I didn't think about it, I just thought it'll get better. So like, I wasn't taking care of myself at all.
So like, if you're not taking care of yourself, that's that's a big red flag. This manifests in so many different ways. It may, and the worst way to manifest is in suicide or in, like I know I have an old friend that died in a drunk motorcycle accident and I don't know his immediate situation around that we parted like we just hadn't spoken in the years, but I knew it happened.
And I you know, there's other stories I have of physicians and nurses that have just had horrible things happen to them and their family because they never had the ability to get better from this. And then for me, my own recovery process, like so I had a lot of these things like where I was miserable, and I wasn't taking care of myself, and I was doing what I could not to experience my own pain.
And my marriage obviously fell apart. I have a co-parenting like when you recover from this, your relationships, even the hardest relationships that you thought were the hardest relationships in your life, there'll be major changes like as you start getting better. But literally all these relationships will improve like as you start taking care of yourself and just having the intention to improve yourself and improve the relationships in your life, like you'll start finding the ways.
And for me, I did some traditional modalities, like I had a therapist that's very that was very helpful, especially during those times. Previously, doctors have been scared to even say that they have a therapist, which I think is just a really sad place.
A: Yeah.
J: Another thing that I have to mention that that was such a huge part of my own journey was is that I was a setup for this, and I was already developing signs of burnout. But then my brother, who was my best friend, died in a car accident and unexpectedly, completely unexpectedly.
And while my parents and sister were grieving, you know, the best people can grieve doing all the things you're supposed to do when you're grieve, like I just started working. Like I started working as much as I possibly could, like I didn't want to leave the hospital. Like that was my number one source of forgetting about this. And yeah, so for my own, so I think that, like people can live with burnout and just kind of skate by, but they're not living good.
Because they're not in that extreme thing. But if you're kind of living like that, and then all of a sudden a life event happens, like a divorce, a loss of a loved one, you're an injury yourself to yourself or some sort of things that just happened to us in life. Like if that happens, that can send you from like maintaining to just devastated.
A: Yeah, truly you're now like at risk. You've moved into a dangerous place, I think. And so, you know, those those things that they happen in life. So my own process of healing came a lot with addressing grief that I hadn't addressed.
And yeah, so everyone's going to have their own story. So I think that as a community, we have to do a better job of taking care of each other too. Like it's not just about taking care of yourself.
Like we don't we don't take care of each other the way that we should. And I think that this is an honor to get to do this, get to get to be a physician. And I think that it always has been. And I think about like those all especially like for me as a surgeon, there's like thousands of years of people doing this before me. And we paved this path for us to get to do that.
And it's what will happen is that the thing that literally was ruining your life can become this thing that you all of a sudden all this gratitude starts coming out of it. And so now when you have a hard day or a hard shift or something like that, the environment that is me can really handle a hard shift.
And Somatics has just made this even as I'm up to my game even more because it doesn't have to affect me the same way like it would have in the past. Like I don't have to pack anything away that happens, even the hardest things that happen, the surgical complication, unexpected death in the hospital, like the things that happen as a part of our job that I used to just pack away to God knows where right like
A: your neck, your back, your organs. Now like you can just handle that stuff directly. And somatics has been another huge step for me in being able to do this. Wonderful. I mean, it's it's so very literal what you're talking about, this increase in capacity.
So you know, kind of taking that analogy of you said kind of like you're living with burnout, you're living in this sustained level of stress and you're getting by. But then if something happens, and you know, life throws a big curveball at you, it threatens to just like completely wreck you and wreck your life. Like this is now a cancer diagnosis. This is now a heart attack.
This is now totally non-functional, you know, and I can't work at all, losing my job, all of this catastrophic stuff, because there was no reserve. And we can look at this the same way as like your muscles, when your muscles are really bound up and contracted, and they're staying this way habitually, you're waking up in the morning with a tight neck and a tight back, and it's aching and sore until you get moving around, you're sleeping, you're literally sleeping with like muscles that are expending energy, right? If you do, you know, you're getting by like that, you're doing a little yoga, and you're getting things a little more limbered up, but it's going on, it's staying tight, staying in contraction.
Now you have a car accident, a little fender bender, some whiplash, or something even worse, maybe you fall off your bike and you hit your body, slam your body down on the ground, you could break your pelvis because your body's already so contracted and so tight, those muscles can't contract anymore, they go into spasm, and they press down against your bones, and now you have that additional impact, not just of hitting, you know, the pavement, but of your body tightening as you hit the pavement tightening so much, that now you're severely injured, you know, now you're, you've torn a hamstring, now you've torn an ACL.
It's how this works, we have to be able to have that capacity to be able to handle any kind of stressor. If we're living already 80%, almost to 100% of our maximum that we can handle, it's going to break us, it's just a ticking time bomb, and it's just a matter of time before something happens, and there's, there's literal damage that happens, right?
So when you lower your baseline tension, which is what you've been doing when you relax and relax, and you teach your body how to lower, lower, lower that baseline tension, now, if you start from a relaxed place, your muscle literally has so much more strength and power that it can give you.
If you are at that, like taking care of yourself on a daily basis, and you have support from other people, and you're, you know, nourishing your physical body, and you're respecting your own limitations and boundaries in life, like you said before, something stressful happens at work, something stressful happens in your personal life, you've got so much more capacity to be able to deal with that issue because you're not like living on the edge of burnout or living on the edge of a cramp, right? Yeah.
J: Well, in regards to burnout is the house of cards falls real fast. Yeah. When something happens, and it crumbles. But, you know, to talk a little bit about just the relaxation of the muscle. So as part of my own process, I went back and I studied integrative medicine and through Andrew Wiles program at University of Arizona. And one of the emphasis of integrative medicine is that looking at us as one.
So I can't prove this. So I'm not stating this as medical fact, but I do believe I would love to do these tests or find these tests that somebody else did. Is it when you live in a relaxed body? I'm sure. Like I said, I can't prove it with a study. There's not the medical evidence to prove this, but I do the experience of mine is that all my endocrine system, my neuroendocrine system, my cortisol level, all that stuff seems to balance as you live in a more relaxed body.
And so back to the integrative medicine, like looking at us as one, you can't, in Western medicine, we have a tendency to compartmentalize things. Like we look at the heart, we look at the liver, we look at the muscle, we look at the bone. My experience with somatics is just, it's good for your overall wellness. Absolutely.
Yeah. So I love integrative medicine because it allows us to accept all these forms as healing as potentially legit and not just saying that we only do Western medicine or we only do alternative medicine. It basically says we look at all this and see what modalities, including conventional Western medicine, come together with a true integrative plan of attack.
And I think somatics would be a great part of that. I personally would be interested in doing research, and I don't do research anymore, but I would be interested in research in patients that are recovering from things like broken bones and traumatic events. Because the patients I see, like if you're in a car accident, like even people are gonna break bones no matter what.
So I would be interested more in, like you know how you're saying that the tension around the bones, the chronic state of contraction, like how would bones heal if they weren't, and if the muscles weren't in that state of contraction? So I think that's interesting.
A: Yeah, totally. I'm down. I'm down for any research that you have a buddy who works at academia, you wanna throw my way, who might be interested. I am all for facilitating some kind of research, because I think it really, there's only two published studies on Hannah somatic education. One of them involves actually neck pain, right?
How it can benefit people with neck pain. And then the other one was more like kind of these case studies that was looking at like three different people who, and their progress over a period of time. But I think longer form studies will be really fascinating because, and here's kind of a little answer slash anecdote to what you just asked, the question you just posed. So my grandmother paid for my father's Hannah somatic education because she wanted him to do this. He didn't even really know fully what this was when he kind of got initiated into this.
There's a whole story with, like my aunt and my grandmother approaching him and being like, you need to do this thing. So after he was certified, he went to take care of her for three years because she wasn't driving anymore. She was getting on in years. She was in her late 80s and couldn't live alone anymore. And during the three years that my father was taking care of her as she's in her late 80s, right? She, okay, well, I should say the catalyst for him coming down was she fell out of bed and broke her hip, right? And went through this whole recovery process and healed from that, right?
Just by falling out of bed. Then he comes down, lives with her for three years. In three years, he did about 500 hands-on sessions with her because every single day, she would come knock on his door and say session, and he would go in and do a session with her. And she was half asleep and snoring most of the time and like, you know, just how it goes when you're deep in your parasympathetic, right? So, after those three years, her care level increased, and she needed more care. So I, you know, changed my whole life to come and help care for her during her end-of-life phase with my cousin.
My cousin and I lived with her in her home and did full-time caregiving for her as she was towards end of life, right? I watched this little tiny Japanese lady fall four different times, and it was like a scary fall. Like she was walking towards me and she just slipped and like slammed down on the hardwood floor. She fell out of bed once. She also fell off the couch once. And this woman did not break anything.
And my dad and I both postulate that it's because of those 500 hands-on sessions, right? And then even at her end-of-life phase when she was kind of all curled up and immobile in her bed as people do when they're, you know, towards end of life, when we would ask her, are you in any pain? She said, no, she wasn't in any pain.
Even though her body was tightened, contracted, and crumpled up, she didn't need morphine. She died naturally without drugs because she wasn't in any pain. And that is extraordinary for someone at that phase of their life. Usually, people are in a lot of physical pain, you know, and when you move them around, they're suffering, you know, they're laying there in their last moments of life suffering a lot.
And she wasn't. And so this is, you know, something that we didn't, you know, obviously have a team of people studying this, but just anecdotally, like, you know, what does Hannah somatics do if you spend enough time conditioning your nervous system to let go of those tensions? What does that mean for how you age, for how you, you know, face the last moments of your life?
Do you face them in agonizing physical pain of your muscles tight all over your body and making it difficult to breathe? Or do you face them with a relative amount of relaxation, even if you're tight and immobile, right? Yeah.
J: I mean, I think, you know, one of the, it's just in our Western medicine, in our Western medicine, the way we do things, we have these standards of care that we meet and that we do that through this rigorous type of research and things like that. But in the part of my mind, that's just about using medical judgment, right?
Like medical judgment is, doesn't always have a randomized control trial to prove it. And I tend to think of things as what's the risk and what's the benefit? And there's absolutely no risk in this.
I mean, there's no risk in learning to relax your muscles and potentially all these benefits that you talk about. I like hearing case studies. Like I read a good part of Dr. Hannah's book, and he has each chapter is a case study.
And I think that when, and how I use judgment in my own career, if I have a modality that carries literally no risk and potentially huge benefit, then for me to recommend that, I don't necessarily need all the rigorous studies that I would have, like if I'm prescribing a new pharmaceutical with a whole bunch of side effects. Like that, then I like to know like this compared to this that this is worth those risks.
But in Hannah's Maddox, like I literally can't think of any potential risk. Like you're literally just contracting your muscles and then learning to relax. Like there's no harm in learning to relax. Right.
A: Well, and I will say just to say it, there are some very few, few contraindications. So in the case of someone who might have a lot of blood clots, for example, there might be some contraindications simply because when you relax the muscles, the blood starts moving, you know what I mean?
So they'd wanna be cleared by their doctor for any type of exercise, even somatic exercises. Of course. Obviously. And then the other thing that's like maybe a contraindication can be like if someone has a lot of unprocessed trauma and they have unconscious memories of things that they don't remember happening to them. And this is with any type of somatic work.
It doesn't have to be Hannah's Maddox, right? But they start getting in touch with their body, and they have a memory of something from their childhood that's very traumatic show-up, you know, and don't have the tools or the support to deal with it.
Like it can be dangerous in that way that they're suddenly faced with so much that they, you know, but that's, again, not particularly common. It's just something that, you know, like people should be aware of it, but it could happen in a yoga class. Like it could happen in any type of somatic work, you know, where you're getting in touch with your body.
J: And I think that that brings up a good point about burnout is that often we need multidisciplinary teams to take care of ourselves. So like you as a healthcare healer, healthcare practitioner, like if you met someone that you're worried this is gonna happen to, you can get the team in place so that you can safely help that person. And I think like when it comes to burnout, my own, and I know from many other people, I needed like a team.
And that team didn't communicate with each other. I developed the team around me, but I needed various modalities of feeling like I needed, I had a great therapist, but I also had a great meditation teacher and I had great friends. And now I had you in the somatics and I had a Ricky Healer that works close to my job in trauma. And like I've learned how to use these various people on various skills to help keep me well.
Oh, I have a coach too. I was laughing with some of my colleagues about the number of people that we need to keep, just keep ourselves good because I'm lucky now, I work in a group of all trauma surgeons that truly care about their wellbeing. And I'm so happy to be a part of that. And you come together in a community that way and we tell each other different ideas or different things we're trying or different things our wives like are trying. And we share and like we're all bolstering not just our group as doctors, but our PAs, like we're working together to try and get everybody up, right?
Like as opposed to everyone bringing each other down. And, but we were laughing about just the number of people that it takes to keep ourselves well, but I actually think that's really healthy. Like I think it's, you take on a role that's extremely stressful just to have the awareness that just this is a huge part of my own recovery. Just to be able to say I need health. Like I, you are not trained as a trauma surgeon to ask for health.
You are the health, you know, you are the person that fixes things. And that's the thing, I was a fixer. I love to fix everything in everyone's life. Like if they came to me, I immediately had a solution, right? And that was one of those things that goes back to childhood that brought me into this space. But at a certain point, a huge part of this process is just to be able to say like, yeah, I need some healthier things are going so well. And then when you just ask that, this team of people starts forming itself because you get to the rest of them.
A: Yeah, and I think that it is healthy to have, you know, multiple mentors and guides and people that you look to for support. I think that we were meant to live in communities and villages that would have supplied that for us. And now we are kind of splintered.
And a lot of like the ethos or the culture that we maybe had at one point has been shifted in such a way that it's harder to find that. And so now we find specific people who can fill those roles for us. And that's what I call being resourced.
And I do that too. I'm resourced. I have people that I work with that help and support me. And I need that for my ability to help other people. And that's why I think what you're describing with, a group of like-minded physicians in this case, where you are, instead of going out and drinking and partying together, you're showing up for each other and encouraging each other to take care so that you can fulfill your mission here and do the thing that you're doing so importantly in this world. Yeah.
J: And then to add to that, not just to a group of people, but also having your practices and your hobbies and the things that you love, like making space for those things is important. So my practice is now somatics is part of my practice, but I have things that I can go to. I can go to a particular guided meditation or a particular guided teacher.
I can go to my own silent sitting. I can go to somatics next weekend. And my wife and I are gonna go hiking for four days on the Appalachian Trail. That's a hobby, right?
So that takes planning, preparation is something I get excited about. Right across this wall of my backpack and everything weighed out. Decade ago, I didn't have space in my life for these things. And some of that's important. When you're going through surgical training, you don't really have time to just be hiking in the Appalachian Trail and doing all the things that I do now.
And that's okay. Like I did wanna touch on this real quick if anyone out there is a resident. For me, when I was going through residency, I did not have the degree of burnout that I had after.
And I was thinking about that this morning before this talk. And it's because I loved what I was doing. I loved the, and I've always loved what I do, but like I was learning a new skill and that was exhilarating. So I developed characteristics that would lead to burnout. And I was probably burned out at that stage.
I didn't feel it because I was so enthusiastic. And I think that that's a really wonderful time of life too. Like if you do get focused on, like if you are a resident out there and you are like really wanna hone your skill and you wanna learn something really well and you're devoting your life to it. I think that's okay.
Just know that there's risks to that. And like I think what I was lacking was the mindfulness. I wasn't able to say like, I'm doing this right now. But I can't wait to get back into playing basketball or going hiking or reading books or doing all the things that I enjoyed to do as a person. I didn't have any awareness around it or mindfulness around it.
A: Right, and there is, there's seasons to life. Seasons, yes. And we go through phases where, yeah, like it's go time. Like we're getting it done and we're sacrificing certain things. And, you know, but then there's gonna be a different season and your body will force you into a season of self-care. If you don't make that a priority, your body will let you know.
J: So learning surgery was one of the most exhilarating, fun seasons in my life that I'm forever grateful for. Learning myself and how to take care of myself and how to take the foot off the gas is also one of the most exhilarating, just a different kind of exhilarating, but it's one of the greatest seasons of my life.
So, you know, it's interesting, all these paradoxes that we find. And that's a huge one. Like the thing that I'm saying like caused me to be burned out and this and that is one of the things I love the most. I just had to learn how to love it in a way that was good for me. And, you know, just learn that. And so anyway, both things are true. Totally.
A: And I want to reflect a bit on, you know, how far I've seen you come in the time that we've been working together, not only in your literal muscular, you know, way that your body's being held, all that tension that you were carrying around your neck and shoulders has just really melted away, you know? And your posture has shifted, you know, the way that you express and share things very easily, very fluidly.
You just seem so much more alive and free than the person that I met at that networking event who was like carrying this like invisible backpack around, just carrying this burden, you know? And I feel like I've gotten to meet like the real you. I've gotten to meet like this, this you that was underneath all that accumulated stress, you know? That you that you were kind of like, like trying to get back to or trying to find again.
You know, and he were just right there on the edge of being able to connect there at that level again. You know, and what I noticed was that, you know, when I met you, you were very like clear that like I can't keep working nights. Like my, you know, I am, I can't keep doing this. Like it was almost like your body was like, I'm about to burn out again if things don't change. And you even thought you had to have a career change.
And what I saw about two, three months now into the program is that you're like, actually, I'm good. Like I love my job and I love what I do. And, you know, I don't need to change my career. I don't need to stop working nights.
What you needed was to let your body actually be able to rest when it was time to rest and not stay elevated and stay in that stress state. And so it's like, I hear this from people a lot. Like they think their desk chair needs to change. They think that their boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife needs to change in order for their experience to be better. You know, and it's not that those things don't have an impact.
They absolutely do. Working night shift is hard. But if, what if you changed instead? What if your capacity increased, right? How would those problems appear? How would those outward things feel? How would your desk chair feel if your back was relaxed? Right?
J: Yeah. I mean, it's super interesting. Because this, what you described has been my journey to past six months. We met at an event where I was trying to promote this new business that I was starting, which I think is a good business. I had studied integrative medicine. I have a degree in integrative medicine. So I was, when we met, I was starting to plan on the side, integrative medicine, telehealth business to hopefully help me reduce the number of shifts I had to work in the hospital because it is hard work.
But you're absolutely right. Over the course of this program, I've been able to see that I began to see a little bit of that part of me was running from work, which exactly like you said, like I don't need a new chair. I still need to be healthy about it.
Like the old Jeff, the one that you, the one that's before you and I even met would be like, okay, well now my body's feeling good. I can work 26 shifts a month. I can, I can, I can save some money. I can do all these things.
Like, so that's not what I'm saying, but I've already created my life in such a way that it's manageable and now that feels much more manageable. So for sure, for sure. Like everything you said about your observation of the, over the past six months has been, I don't have anything to add, like that's absolutely true.
And somatics has been a big, big part of that. And that does bring me to one other point I wanted to make is that like often when we're burned out, we immediately to go to your analogy, we immediately want to go to, I need a new chair. Like, and we can get very desperate in getting that new chair.
So like, let's say that chairs are really hard to find and you're like, I need this new chair. And that energy of like really desperately wanting that new chair just adds fuel to the fire. And I've experienced this like you just said with somatics, but also there's been other times that I've had this realization that I don't need a new chair, but you might need to redesign your chair.
A: Right, or redesign your working hours and how you spend your time in that chair.
J: So exactly. So like things I did and see, you're not gonna find the solution in any one particular thing. You're not gonna find the solution in a new job, but you may improve things with a new job. And you're not gonna find the solution in just learning meditation, but you will improve things in learning meditation. And I think somatics is one of those tools.
And I think that somatics is one of the ones I would say and now is very necessary one because you have to get somehow like getting in touch with your body and getting comfortable with your body is just such a wonderful thing to do for yourself. Yeah, so your assessment of me through this course is spot on.
A: Yeah, tell us a little bit about like, for anybody who is curious about what is it that we do in this, the Radiance program? Like what has been your experience?
J: Well, we do our one-on-one sessions where there are more hands on and you're helping me go through the movements of really just tightening our muscles and relaxing our muscles. And so we do those one-on-one sessions that have been great.
And then we do our online sessions in a group where you're talking us through things over a computer setting like this. In those sessions, I've learned more how to do the movements myself. And then I've developed a practice like you've encouraged where I try and do some somatics every day, even if it's only five minutes, it helps.
But my experience, so that's what we do. My experience of this is one of, this isn't a term and is peripheral neuroplasticity. Like it's like a remembering of how they're relaxed. And like TAN is termed the somatic amnesia. Sensory motor amnesia. Sensory motor amnesia.
A: Yeah, the motor cortex has not been connected to this space directly. It's been being controlled autonomically by the cerebellum maintaining contractions.
J: So that reconnection I experienced as a form of neuroplasticity. Just like very similar to in meditation, how new awarenesses start coming up and you start to develop sides of yourself that you had been amnestic to for a very long period of time due to trauma or due to whatever reason.
And I find that hanosomatics, the same thing is true except for on a peripheral muscular level. Like at the gym now, I'm so much more aware if I'm doing an exercise like a bench press or some sort of thing, I'm so much more aware of what muscles are contracting but also what muscles are relaxing.
So on the contraction, like we've talked about before is to contract my chest, my back has to loosen. And I wasn't aware of that before. I wasn't aware. It probably wasn't loosening. Yeah, probably it wasn't. Yeah, it probably wasn't. But like, even if it was, I wasn't the lengthening is the word of it. The lengthening of certain muscles when other muscles are contracting.
And now when I'm doing an exercise, I'm much more aware of what's going on but also I'm aware of like, if I'm just driving, like I didn't realize like I'm driving and one foot is on the gas and the break and my other leg is just sitting there contracted. So now what happens is I think I come to a red light and I think, well, why is my left leg just, it's not doing anything. Well, why is it sitting there contracted? So I'll notice that and just be able to relax it.
A: Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing thing. And then the rest of my drive, I'm there relaxed. I, you know, honestly, another thing that I've never shared with you is that I do think also being in a relaxed body from a leadership standpoint really helps.
So like when I walk into a Toronto situation and I'm even more relaxed than I used to be. Like you're a certain degree of relaxation because you're in your power. You've done this hundreds of times and you're comfortable in that role of being the team leader and this and that.
But the whole team is looking at for you to be relaxed. So I can embody that so much better now than I even did six months ago. And because it's not just my mind that's relaxed. Like I literally walk in and I don't feel myself like tight. Not even if I was saying things from a calm state of mind, my body wasn't matching that. So I do feel like, especially in what I do from a leadership standpoint, like people are looking at you to be calm and collected and relaxed and your body is such a huge part of that.
A: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I actually do workshops and presentations about embodied leadership and how to use somatics as a tool for that because of what you're saying. You have the confidence that when you show up with a calm nervous system and you're not ruffled and already freaked out and thinking about all the things that could go wrong when you have this sort of competence, confidence, air about you, people are not only like attracted to that, but they are in turn soothed by it.
And it helps to calm the situation and make things more cooperative and more smooth, which is what we really want from our leaders. We want our leaders to be making, people connect with each other in a way that problems can get solved in the way that, situations can move forward, that projects can move forward.
That's what we kind of want from our leaders. And when a leader is able to embody and authentically show up as someone who is calm and confident and capable with that newfound capacity of a relaxed physical body, that's where we can really start to see, and this is why I call the program Radiance, that it impacts everybody else. It impacts all the other people who are working under you alongside you, the people you're interacting with, all get to benefit from that radiating energy of it's gonna work out and we're gonna figure this out together.
J: And yeah, as you're saying that, I'm just thinking how much that helps my patients and their families too, because I have to deliver a lot of heartbreaking news. And in the situations where to inspire confidence goes a long ways in helping that person recover from whatever it is challenged that they're facing.
Yes. And something I've thought about a lot over the years is how to speak to someone remaining calm, but also really showing that I care. And you can't, early on in my career, I'd sometimes be an emotional mess. And you don't want to, at least I don't want to be in it like that because that's not inspiring a lot of confidence if I'm also upset like the family is. So I went through a period of time early in my career where I was like, well, I'm not gonna, I just can't get emotional with families anymore.
It's not appropriate and it's not inspiring confidence. But then I thought, okay, well now I'm not, how do I show that I care? And I think what we're talking about, a relaxed state, there's still a lot of space for compassion there.
A: It's not like- And emotion to exist. It's not a relaxed detached state. It's a relaxed engaged state. And honestly, that's when I met you. I noticed that in you, like the way we were communicating.
J: It's a relaxed engaged state of being, which is something I've been striving for for a long time. And we'll continue like it. You're never quite there, right?
A: It's a practice. It's a practice.
J: It has practice and that's what makes life good, right?
A: There are all kinds of smart reasons why we withdraw, why we detach, why we dissociate so much intelligence behind that too. And then not staying stuck in that, not staying bound and imprisoned by that detachment or that dissociation, you're not going to be able to come out of that and come back into a baseline or a balanced kind of experience in your body where you're able to bring that calm presence. We are talking about competence and confidence, but you said the word inspire. And ultimately what you're inspiring in your patients is hope and faith.
Hope and faith. And that's what leadership really offers too. And I think that's why it's healer, heal thyself because you can only do that. You can inspire hope and faith that will allow for deeper healing to occur no matter what is happening, right? Even if it's just someone surviving the loss of their spouse, they're gonna need that hope and faith. And that is gonna radiate from a person who is embodying that relaxed state and not all tied up in their own pain and injury at that moment. Yeah.
J: And one of the things I've learned over the course of my career and my experiences is you can't talk someone into hope and faith. You can't rationalize it. And I think that in my own experience when I was first starting out, that's what you want. Because you want it really bad for them. So you want to explain to them, there's a lot of the causing and this and that like embodying it truly is the way to share it. To communicate it. Because you can't find words. Like you can't talk somebody into it.
A: It's not a mental process.
J: It's a living experience. Yeah. Yeah.
A: Yeah, that's beautifully said. Like that, yeah, I agree with you. We can't, just like you can't really talk somebody into like a good mood. Like even if you were to say something funny, it's the energy that you're giving off. It's the energy behind the joke that does it. It's not the actual words themselves.
J: 100%. Yeah. And this brings up one of my favorite things we talked about is in somatics, is the day that we talked about spontaneous right action. And the Buddhist, right? We just concept the spontaneous right action. And when, like those moments of that, when you're in, I'm not just talking about my action, I'm talking about the groups. Like when that is happening, in whatever circumstance I'm in, that to me is the most beautiful moments of life. And it's the same thing that someone would call grace, I think is what I would call spontaneous right action.
It's filled with grace. And I like to think that, I know that when you are doing things like somatics and having a strong meditation practice and contemplative practice and working on yourself, you get to enjoy more moments like that.
A: Yes, yes, because those practices, right? And what they do for your physical body, but also your mental and emotional and spiritual body, is they create fertile ground for the phenomenon of grace to be present and occur.
J: 100%. And I, And space for it. Somatics helps that in my own experience.
A: Yeah, and mine too. And then so many people that I work with, I mean, it's really is, when I tell people that they can age with grace and move their physical body with grace, it's actually talking about that bigger picture, grace too.
It's not just looking good. It's feeling free in your body, free to move, free to respond and interact and connect, right? And that is that grace that we're speaking of here, is that kind of phenomenon of being in the flow, being connected and alive and present with the moment as it's occurring and allowing space for intuition and sensing and inner knowing to start guiding your actions, behaviors, not just thoughts and preconditioned notions of how we should behave, right? And how we should act.
J: Yeah, I think you said inside out, did you say that earlier?
A: Oh yeah, that's the name of the podcast.
J: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It truly is. You know, I read a book, I gotta find it. It's literally called something like becoming inside out. And I guess I just never even, that never even hit me, but yeah, really it is, like it really is. I think that becoming inside out is everything you're just saying. Yeah, yeah. It connects you to these spaces that we're talking about.
A: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think this has just been such a powerful conversation. I know that it is, at this point, part of your mission to create connection and community with other physicians and healthcare workers who may be starting to realize that they're on the edge of burnout. And as part of this conversation today, you graciously said if somebody's listening and wants to reach out to you for some support or resources that you'd be happy to provide that.
And I just, I think that's so incredibly wonderful. So let people know a little bit about where they could find you or how there's resources and support might look like.
J: Yeah, so we'll put my email in the show notes. It's drcarderuponahealth.net, which was the integrative medicine company I was trying to start, but I'm still gonna use that email. And I do wanna just say, like I really sincerely mean this for all healthcare workers, because one of the phenomenons of burnout is that we have an ER nurse is burned out, a doctor that's burned out, a respiratory therapist that's burned out.
These were all having very high demands. It all looks a little bit different because our roles are a little bit different. But what ends up happening is we all come to the same place and then we're giving each other very looks and we're not like, and it's just not, sometimes it's not a good work environment and everybody's complaining about each other.
And all that does is add to the misery of the experience of being in the hospital when you're feeling it. And there's a lot of complaining and bickering and that going on. So what I really would like to do is bring together community of all different people that work in the hospital. Like anybody that works in the hospital. Like one of my favorite people in my hospital right now is the nighttime shift coffee barista guy. And he's always so happy.
I don't know if I'm always so happy at three and four in the morning, but I don't know if I'm really even going to get coffee from him because of the coffee, but his energy just boosts me up. So what I think is that I would love to build community, even if we don't work in the same hospital, but if we start building community around this together and share with each other what this experience is like for a nurse, for a respiratory therapist, for a general, I don't mean to leave anybody out, for a hospital administrator, even anybody that's working in these buildings. I think that sharing our experiences in a place where it's safe to truly be honest about like what's going on for you and not fear like repercussions is something I would like to do.
So this is my first time ever speaking publicly about this. So I really thank you for having me on. And it's like, it feels really good to just talk about this and to talk about this with you, having helped me so much over the past six months. And I would love to have this conversation with more and more people.
So at some point soon, I'll start a community on one of the various community apps and we can see where it goes. So, but, and also for someone that I, through my own process, I've been able to come across lots of resources for people. So no matter where somebody is in this stage, I'd love for anyone to send me an email or reach out to me and communicate. So that's just really where I'm at. But I, most of all, I'm just very grateful for this opportunity to share my experience in the public forum.
A: Thank you. Thank you so much again for it. I mean, it hit close to home for me, some of our conversations, cause, you know, and I won't get too far into this, but my mother, you know, was a nurse, has been a nurse, is still a nurse and growing up, she was definitely in a long, long phase of sustained what we would call burnout, right? And that affected me and it affects, as we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, you know, our radiance can work the other way too, where we are really dysregulated and stressed out.
It's gonna impact the other people in our life in a really detrimental way. And so this is a big issue. And I feel like, you know, COVID shined a light on that and there's more awareness about it. And hopefully there will continue to be more awareness and more resources and more people like you stepping forward to, you know, initiate a bigger systemic change that is needed and coming for this industry to survive, honestly.
J: Yeah. And I think that's happening, but I think that the importance of that being grassroots to some extent is really important.
A: Yes.
J: Because you cannot, no matter how well-meaning a hospital might be, a hospital can't cure this for me. It has to be me empowering myself.
A: Yeah.
J: And I think that like, no matter how many yoga classes I went to or meditations I did, like it really has to come from inside us.
A: Right. Yeah. And that's what, I mean, just, somatics is about reconnecting with yourself and building that foundation in yourself. And then the yoga, the meditation, the talk therapy, all of that will be more effective when you have that practice of sensing and listening in and building pathways to get feedback from your body about what's happening, real-time, what's happening, right, in your physical body.
And so, yeah, I'm so, so proud of your progress, and just you who you are has been so exciting to get to meet, like I said, the you underneath, you know, that ball of stress. And I'm really excited, and I can't wait to continue to support you in all of the different ways that you're gonna show up in the world and make a difference.
J: Thank you, Aimee. And likewise.
A: Absolutely wonderful talking with you. And we'll see each other again soon.
J: Okay, all right.
A: Hey there, friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram @AimeeTakaya and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution.
And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics, consider leaving a review or a rating. And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.
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