Hypnotherapy, Somatics, and True Healing in ME/CFS/LC with Anna Grear, LLB

Hypnotherapy, Somatics, and True Healing in ME/CFS/LC with Anna Grear, LLB

00:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to the EnergyMD podcast where we help you resolve your chronic fatigue syndrome and long COVID so that you can get back to living your best life. So I'm really excited today because we're going to be talking with my friend Anna Grear. She helps people also with long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome, but she comes from a different lens, which is going to be really great to get her perspective on a number of different things. So let's learn a little bit about her.

00:31

So previously professor of law and theory at Cardiff university in the UK and still adjunct professor of law at the university of Waikato, New Zealand. Anna now works as a hypno healer and coach for people with long-term complex fatigue conditions. She also works with spiritual emergence issues. Anna brings a long time passion for understanding the intelligence of materiality together with her skillset in mind shifting and hypnotic influence.

01:01

She's passionate about health optimization and radical human becoming. If you are a little bit confused by some of those fancy words that she used in the bio, you're not alone because I am as well. is very well spoken and I'm sure she's going to break these things down for us and we're going to understand exactly what she's talking about by the time we get through all of this. Anna, thanks so much for joining me today. It's an absolute delight to see you again, Evan. Truly it's wonderful to see your face and hear your voice.

01:30

Yeah, likewise. So let's talk. You mentioned that you have a new program coming out, and I want to talk about what necessitated the need for this program. What was the evolution of you or of your thinking, of your work that ended up leading to this program? OK, so I guess my story is, like many of us, coming from a long experience of ME-CFS. would say I had a 32-year dance with it.

01:59

It was a bit on and off because I had a 10 year period when I just didn't even use the label. I knew I had to be careful, but I still, you know, I didn't use the label. And then I had a massive crash relapse in about 2016 because I was head of law at Cardiff and, you know, there's various institutional factors that meant that my body was overloaded and woo-hoo, off I went. And that was the point at which I started to enter this kind of world.

02:27

because I started to get really interested in health optimization science layers of recovery. I had long studied a form of philosophy and thinking called new materialism, which looks at the intelligence of matter itself, matter as a kind of materialization. So of course it was very natural to think in terms of the multiple intelligences of the body, cellular intelligences, microbial intelligence and all that. So I got really excited about all of that.

02:57

But I also started to see the writing on the wall in the sense that I honestly didn't think I would manage to stay on as an academic. It was just too physically demanding with all the pressures of the institution and the shifts in higher education and everything else. So I retrained. I decided I wanted to work with people who were coming along the path I was on. And I began by training at the Optum Health Clinic as a therapeutic coach. So I've got their training, but...

03:26

it was hypnosis training that really just gripped me. was like falling into the world of Gandalf. It was like tumbling through stars in constant amazement of what the implicit creative unconscious can actually do. And it was there that I really kind of went deep and I studied with some of the best people in the world, experts in mind shifting, using things like mind bending language, which is a way of kind of

03:52

speaking in a way that almost produces a Cohen-like effect in the brain so that a person's mind expands and comes in and expands. And then there's a moment that comes when they kind of go, and you can see it, and that's when you can get a shift. So I got really excited about all of that. And I started thinking, well, I could combine my skill as an educator with this new set of experiences and trainings I had. And I was working with clients and seeing great results.

04:22

So that all came together in my head and I thought, you know, I could help more people with the program than I can working one-to-one. So I ran a program for about a year to 18 months with weekly coaching sessions that formed the basis of this new program. But the people on that program kept saying, you should sell the online component of this as a standalone because it alone is transformative. So I thought, well, okay. So I basically...

04:50

took their advice and that's what I've done. So that was the genesis of the new program. And so take us through the process that you take people through. First, I want you to say the name of the program because there's no way that I'm going to remember that I'm going to remember what you just told me. I can barely remember it. It's called Sematic Liberation, the deep intelligence healing system.

05:18

Gosh, it doesn't sound so intimidating the second time. guess, you know, the more times I hear it, the better it'll go. But yeah, take us through what does that process look like to help you? So what it looks like in terms of actually once you're on the program, you mean like the actual process that the program takes you through? I assume you mean that. Yeah, like a multiple step process for healing and transformation. Like what do those steps look like? Right. So the first step...

05:44

is a couple of experiences that are multi-layered hypnotic experiences that are designed to blow out unconscious limitations. So that kind of expands a sense of possibility. It expands the possibility of an otherwise, which I think is really important because I think when we're unwell, we can get locked into reality tunnels in which it almost feels impossible that could ever be otherwise. And so this goes right in and looks at...

06:10

human capacity for limitation breaking based in neuroscience and evidence around the power, the sheer power of the imaginative creative brain to actually shift physiology. And, you know, I'm going to say physiology shifts the brain too, but I won't go there because of this bit is all about breaking unconscious limitation. So that's the first stage. And then there's a second stage, which is a long self calibration exercise looking at

06:38

physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions of human wellbeing. And it's a bit of an intimidating checklist. No one is probably ever going to do it in the whole of their lives and that's okay. The idea of it is to spot the low hanging fruit. So for example, if you're looking at physiology and you're starting to think about light intelligence, you might be looking at circadian biology and your sleep habits.

07:04

And if you're doing that and ticking off what you do and don't do, you could spot three easy wins. So it's about helping people spot, oh, I could add this easily. Because my conviction, Evan, is that healing is a life journey. It's a practice and it's iterative. I'm not as interested in recovery as I am in deep healing, which is a whole other conversation we can have. So there's that. And then they get into the first bit of meat.

07:31

real meat for them, which is a series of exercises in self-directed neuroplasticity. And that's really a set of tools and techniques for reverse engineering, incredibly calm, safe, resourceful states, very, very quickly. Then there's some trance training cycles, which is really about learning how to come in and out of trance, which humans do all the time, very, very naturally. It's nothing odd about trance. We come in and out of trance the whole time. And we could even argue.

07:59

that we're in a trance that we need to change. So, but it's really about how to drop down into trance states and then to learn self-hypnosis, which is an extraordinary life skill. Because once you can drop in and out of trance, you can change things on the fly. You can open up resources, capacities of knowing and sensing that escape the cognitive limitations of the neocortical process to get you into kind of a much more somatic sensing of what

08:28

information is coming in from within the body and outside the body. that helps self-hypnosis work is really useful. And then there's some free form protocols for working with the unconscious mind. So some simple exercises for engaging the unconscious. Then there's another layer, which is once they know how to do that, I know that they can hold space for themselves in a really spacious, safe, self-loving way.

08:57

And once I know that people can do that, they're ready to go on to the deeper material of starting to explore with the unconscious, like working with dreams, working with something called idiomotor signaling, which is where you ask unconscious questions and it sends you little flick signals according to how you set it up, gives you answers. You get the capacity to just explore territory non-cognitively in extraordinary ways and stuff around

09:25

boundary placing, self-knowing, working with the body, things like idio, idio-effective drawing or neuro-effective drawing. So in emotional state, drawing both hands, drawing the emotional state, feeling it shift and then coming down to calm with both hands. It's all very somatic, hence the name of the program. And then the next layer is intuition training, which is really about developing interoceptive and extraceptive.

09:54

capacities for seeing, feeling and sensing. And finally, the final layer is where it gets into spirituality. And it's not angels and candles or anything like that. It's actually meditation, some guided meditations and some multi-layered hypnotic recordings around things like love, joy, compassion, equanimity, really profound spiritual values. And the idea of that is twofold. One is to

10:24

align with those deeper values which attune us to something far more resonant in the self. And the other is to allow people to experience very expanded states of consciousness. Because even if they do that briefly, it's a kind of fluid aperture in which the brain can see things differently. So if I've got a problem, and then I have an experience of a massive expansion from that expanded perspective, that problem

10:53

looks very different and I can move around it. I can see how plastic it is. I can see that I can actually have choicefulness and agency. So those are the layers. And yeah, people are really enjoying it, really loving it. It's fun apart from anything else. It's very light on theory. There is some neuroscience right up for each segment, but you don't have to read it. It's very practical and actually weirdly in a way coarse.

11:21

is a wrong word or programs a wrong word. It's more like an experiential journey into your own immense capacities for joyful change. I love it. Yeah, it does sound very practical. I like things that are very practical. And I love the fact that you are that you're you've created it in that way. Let's do a couple of definitions. So can you tell us what somatic means for those who are? Yeah, well, my understanding, soma, the body.

11:50

somatic to do with the body, the embodied field. And so for me, somatic is a way of getting at the bodies, knowing the body's field of intelligence. It's that kind of thing. So if I work somatically, I'm working with that bodily flux of emotion, sensation in the body, sensory capacity to open up to little signs, little muscular tensions that might tell me that something's going on.

12:16

just becoming a reader, an expert reader of your own unconscious signaling, because the body is always communicating, always. And so if we can tune into that communication, we become a partner with our own embodied intelligence, which we're never not, by the way, but there's a fold in us that's self-aware. We have this self-aware reflective capacity and we can bring that into attunement with the 97 % implicit knowing that we really are.

12:44

in ways that allow that enormous intelligence to be activated in ways that we can then align with our best interests. It's really cool. Very cool. Yeah. My wife, Stacey often talks about how noticing is a superpower, you know, and that's essentially we're talking about the mindfulness, the noticing, being able to pay attention to actually what's happening in the body. And what I've seen, you know, in terms of nervous system retraining is that it's a big part of healing. Are you seeing that as well?

13:13

I am seeing that as well. I would say that the model of nervous system retraining that I come across a lot tends to be a bit what I call neurocentric. It's very cranial brain talking to the body as if the body's a thing that responds to the brain. I think the nervous system obviously communicates in more than one direction, but I also think there are ways in which you communicate to the nervous system that are purely somatic. Sunlight, for example, if I get adequate light in the morning,

13:42

That's direct communication of sufficiency to my nervous system. If I get a good protein intake early in the day, the amino acid sufficiency is communicating to my nervous system. And I think all these things are really important because it shows the kind of multi-dimensional nature of ourselves and the way in which we can care in layers that go beyond a kind of commanding human mind saying, I'm going to get better. This is how I'm going to do it.

14:13

I see the body as the guru. So for me, the body is the teacher and the brain is the body anyway. It's evolved in the body. It's about the body fundamentally. And yeah, I agree with you. Noticing is a superpower. And I think there are two different kinds of noticing, at least one is a kind of specific noticing. I notice this specific thing. I'm going to take my awareness fully into this specific site of tension or this...

14:41

specific nervous system activation in this moment. And the other is a more field embodied awareness where we kind of got an open monitoring. There's nothing specific we're paying attention to, but we're in a noticing capacity. We're in an awareness capacity where that kind of noticing becomes more responsive to the specific and we can lens in and lens out in a really interesting way. So is that more receiving?

15:11

I think the whole thing's receptive to me. think I love the idea of receptivity as a posture in life, right? A kind of open, curious, receptive, playful, yeah, receptiveness. I'm going circles now, but to me, receptivity is a fantastic state to be in, to talk of healing. I think unless we're receptive, unless we have receptivity, I don't actually think we can heal without receptivity.

15:40

Would you agree? I would.

15:44

And let's talk a little bit about hypnotherapy. you know, there are still people who aren't familiar with the fact that hypnosis and hypnotherapy is actually, at least according to the American Medical Association, it's actually considered conventional medicine, which is kind of amazing because, and, you know, and a lot of people don't know that Freud actually wanted to be a hypnotherapist. He thought that was really the way to go.

16:09

but he wasn't that good at it. So he had to go over here and invent something else, right? Cause he really wanted to invent something and be the first at something, right? So can you kind of tell us a little bit about, know, I mean, there's so much research on it, but just talk about it for some of those who are skeptical about hypnotherapy. Okay. There is something like over 2000 research papers on the effectiveness of hypnosis and hypnotherapy. And obviously hypnotherapy is using hypnosis therapeutically.

16:37

You can use hypnosis in other ways to entertain people on a stage or whatever. And one of the inventors of NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, who was a hypnotist, famously said, everything is hypnosis and hypnosis doesn't exist, which is a really interesting paradox. But hypnosis in a way has always been around. Hypnos, I believe, is the Greek for sleep and they had Greek sleep temples.

17:03

where there would be a kind of taking into a hypnotic trance state. And I think people often think hypnosis is only about trance states. Actually, you don't need trance for hypnosis. You can stick somebody's hand to a table and get them to believe that their hand is stuck to a table and they can't move it without putting them into a trance. So hypnosis is a kind of, to my mind, the best definition of it is hypnosis is a kind of leading of attention.

17:32

directing of cognition and seeding of ideas in order to lead someone to an altered experience of their own reality. And obviously quite a lot of things fit that definition, lots of different practices of hypnosis. But the most common one that people will be aware of is when you see a hypnotherapist, they'll give you a long relaxation induction, talk you down into a very relaxed state and then maybe repeat over and over suggestions that the unconscious mind is meant to accept.

18:03

I think that's as dull as ditch water. The training I did had no scripts and actually was more about the underlying neuroscience of change, memory reconsolidation, which we can talk about. And once you understand that underlying structure, you can play hypnotically on the fly, conversationally and literally switch people's perceptions around very, very quickly by seeding ideas,

18:32

leading their attention, directing their cognition and leading them into an altered experience of their reality. Why? Because we're all creating our own experience of reality all the time anyway. We just don't know we are. We think that what we think is out there is real rather than our response or our framing of what's there. And once we understand that, there's so much agency and power in that realization that yes, we can actually move our sense of things

19:02

so powerfully that the pharmacology we've got online, which is the most powerful pharmacology you can imagine, we can get tides of neurotransmitters in a split second. And if anyone doubts that, think of the moment when you're watching a film and someone jumps out of the cupboard and suddenly you're terrified and your body's flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, noradrenaline. And that's a hypnotic suggestion right there. There's nothing actually kind of objectively real happening in the room.

19:31

but you're unconscious and your body do not know the difference. And that means that we've got enormous power to exploit exactly that imaginative capacity to actually shift what's going on all the time. So are you saying that part of healing is switching your perception? Oh, massively, massively. But I do think as well, switching your perception is a thoroughly material matter. So we know that 90 % of our serotonin is produced in the gut. So we know that

20:02

For example, gut health could be a fantastically material way of changing our perception. It's not obvious, it's not direct, but it's all involved. And yes, perception is huge because how I perceive creates what I see. So you know that thing, Evan, when you, I don't know if you've had this, you buy a new car and suddenly everyone on the road is driving the same damn car. And it's not that we have manifested in some bizarre way or that we,

20:31

have some incredible power in the world. It's that the brain has gone, oh, you've told me consciously or unconsciously, you've told me this is important to you. So my reticular activating system is gonna show me more of what I tell it is important. So my perception is hugely influential. If the first thing I do in the morning is wake up and go, oh God, where are the symptoms? Guess what my brain is gonna be looking for? It's gonna be looking for symptoms. And this is not woo and it's not denying the reality of what people experience.

21:01

This is how we work. This is actual neurobiology. This is our brain body system in action. So yeah, perception is huge. someone wakes up and they have symptoms, what do they do with that? How do they switch their perception? I think what you do for me, the thing I always advise people to in the face of symptoms is I never ignore them, but I do accept them. I do allow them.

21:29

And I frame symptoms, and this is my choice, as intelligent communication from an incredibly intelligent system. And so I'm going to be curious about that symptom. Now, sometimes, because I've worked on self-attunement, and people do, and you can become quite discerning about, my nervous system activated, or is this a loop? Is this a redundant loop in my system? So, you know, for me, there came a point when I went to the gym and I got my classic post-exertional malaise signal.

21:58

And I had got to the point in my healing where I was able to say, thank you, but I don't need you. And it stopped. Now, earlier in my journey, had I ignored that, I would have set myself back. But it's that discernment between when the symptom is intelligent, real-time communication from a system that's saying, there's no energy here right now, so don't push me. Or there's a virus, so don't push me.

22:26

or the gut's distressed, so please attend to it, whatever it is that we need to attend to. There's a difference between that and habituation of the brain making prediction errors. When I wake up, I feel ill. When I wake up, I feel ill. When I wake up, I feel ill. That's a prediction. And obviously we know that to change that, we have to create a prediction error. And we can do that using neuroscientific rapid, neurosynaptic change work by associating to a different state.

22:56

I've had clients when they wake up, I've said, how do want to feel when you wake up? And we find a precise moment, their precise memory of the last time they woke up and felt terrible. And we go to that precise moment in this session and we create a different kinesthetic, somatic energy in the body and they pump it up. So it's a real experience. They've got the neurotransmitters and chemicals all online. They're feeling it for real. And they take that fantastic feeling.

23:24

to that trigger and they do that a few times and the brain then goes, hang on a minute, I can't choose between the normal state and this state in my prediction and prediction collapses. And then they'll say, when I think of waking up, I feel neutral. Well, you know, then you've got to shift a perceptual shift. So the next time they wake up, there's a chance that they'll feel neutral. But if they don't, you give them tools for, how do I allow this?

23:51

How do I remain in curiosity? How do I know this is safe? How do I just simply allow and honor the fact that my body is speaking to me in this moment? And let's face it, if anything's gonna make us feel safe, it's coming into trust again with the fundamental materiality of who we are. Gosh, feeling safe is such an important part of healing. Yes, it is. Do you have any practical tips on helping people feel safe?

24:20

Yes, mean, very simple things that people can do. One is to go peripheral. So, Evan, can you find something you're even vaguely anxious about? Yes. Right. OK, so out Should I say it out loud? Huh? Should I say it out loud or should I just hold Yeah, if you want to. That's up to you. My daughter is traveling in Japan right now and they've got seismic activity. So I'm bit anxious about that. OK, so on a scale of one to ten, where ten is climbing out of your skin,

24:50

And one is, where are you? I'm like a four. Like a four. Okay. So that's set point, right? Evan, I'm looking at you, you're looking at me. I'm your point of focus right now. You're mine. I want you to become aware of the peripheral space while gazing at me, the peripheral space, side of you, just become aware of it and allow it to broaden and broaden and broaden, broadening out. So broad, Evan, that you could almost imagine that you could see behind you, but you can't, but it's fine.

25:20

just really, really broad and just stay with that open feeling. Now what you're to notice in a minute is that your body begins to just calm down.

25:32

You feel it? I do. If you stay with it, you'll get even calmer. And then it gets to the point where you almost feel like you've had a spliff. Almost feel like what? You've had a spliff. A spliff? I do. Yeah. Yeah. And that's really simple. And that works because you're literally reverse engineering environmental learning. So when we, when we're attacked, we go foveal.

26:02

Because if there's a predator, if someone bursts into this room now, Evan, I'm going to forget all about you. I'm to feel all about that, right? And my whole focus is going to come in narrow. And what we find is anxiety is that we do a metaphorical version of that. We loop and we obsess and we go into a little tunnel where the thing becomes enormous and we're all about it. So by reverse engineering that physiologically, it allows the whole system to open and shift.

26:32

And the other magical thing about that is because you're reverse engineering what we naturally do when we're calm. Like if you go into a really big open space, if you ever noticed, if you're out in the wilderness and you can see everything, how damn calm you feel because you can see everything, right? You feel safe because you can see it all. So that's what you're saying to your body. You're saying, hey, we are really broad and peripheral right now, so we're safe. And not only does the body come down, but the mind

27:01

activity naturally tends to quieten as well. Now the great thing about that one is you can feel safe and you can do it, I mean you can live there. I'm talking to you from it now, you wouldn't know, right? I live there as much as I can and there are lots of reasons I choose to do that, some of which are to do with intuitive knowledge. You'd be surprised what you pick up when you're peripheral that you don't see when you're foveal. So there's that. But also it's just not socially embarrassing. A lot of things that people say to do like put a knot

27:30

object across your body or say stop or tap yourself. They're kind of socially embarrassing. They're not easy go tos in a conversational setting. But this one is no one would ever know. You could walk down the street doing it. No one needs to know. I wonder. Go ahead. I was going to say another one is long talking. So if you're in a conversation with someone and you feel unsafe, you can just keep talking on an outbreath and you just keep talking and talking and talking and then you breathe in.

28:00

So the long out-breath sends you parasympathetic. It's like the 7-11 breathing or the other techniques we use for long out-breathing. That is another non-socially embarrassing way of going parasympathetic when you're feeling unsafe in a situation where you're having to talk.

28:18

Is that why when people are nervous and they kind of forget to breathe, it's like they're trying to manage that fear or those nerves by continuing with that out-breath? Possibly. I mean, I'm not sure because for me, what I notice when people get nervous is their throat gets tense, their porosity goes up and gets faster.

28:44

So by talking on a long out-breath, what you're really doing is you're just changing the relationship between the oxygen and the carbon dioxide by not breathing in. And that will, it's like peripheral, it's like peripheral sign that Andrew Huberman teaches, you know, the...

29:01

You know that one? I know. Oh, OK. So Andrew Huberman says this is the fastest way to get calm ever. So you breathe in and then you add a second little top up breath and then.

29:18

And if you, I mean, I'm already like, But if you do that a few times, you get really, really calm, really quickly. And it's a great thing to do after exercise, to go parasympathetic after you've used a machine when you're activated, to go parasympathetic like that immediately gets you into safety, gives your body feedback about, hey, it was really safe to do this exercise. You're cool, you've got it. And it also allows the body to respond quickly, which is great.

29:47

I wonder why that works. That works, I think, because of the exchange of the relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide in the body. But it's also to do with the fact that when we breathe in, the heart speeds up. And when we breathe out, the heart slows down. So I'm assuming that a long out-breath slowing the heart down calms the system and takes it parasympathetic. So it works on a couple of levels.

30:16

And there's a little bit of a hold in there because you're, you take that next breath and then you start to release it very slowly. Yes. Cause there are some of those benefits with holding in breaths and holding out breaths as well. Yeah. And of course you could really make that pause really conscious, couldn't you? That, that could become a real consciousness exercise. The moment of the pause before the out breath. Right. And that's all somatic. Yes. Yes.

30:45

We brought that back to the somatic. yes, yes. I mean, the fastest way to change anything is to address the body, I feel. you know, emotional states go to the body. If any state changed the state in the body, it's far faster than talking about it, looping about it, thinking about it. The body's where it's at. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I love how practical your work is. where can people who are interested in this

31:15

Where can they join your program? Or it sounds like you now have a standalone. Tell us about what you're offering. Yeah, so the program is just that online program. You get 18 months access. And there's a once a week Q &A live with me on Zoom. And there's a private Facebook community that people can join where they can ask questions. And if they tag me and I see it, I'll always answer. And that's great because I've got about nine people on there who are like grads.

31:44

who are also very able to support people. It's very small at the moment, it's just starting. You can find it on my website, which is www.hypnocatalyst.com and it's there under courses. I've got a little sampler at the moment for just 10 pounds, which is a very short sample of the longer course. So if people are a bit kind of, oh, I don't know if this would suit me, they can do that and make.

32:13

decision on the basis of that. Wonderful. And we will drop the link to your website in the show notes. Absolutely. Brilliant. Yeah, it was really lovely to see you, Evan. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I always love the work that you're doing. And I love the evolution of it. And, you know, as we evolve, you know, we make our programs better to the best of our ability, right? I just love seeing that. So love seeing you do that as well.

32:39

Thank you, Evan. It's delightful to see you as ever. And I hope people got value from this. I look forward to finding out if they did or not. Well, if they're questioning things, I I definitely got value from this. And I know that this is very potent work that you're doing. And it's really important work. It's not just potent, but it's impotent. So I hope that if people are questioning this, that they

33:06

They really give it the college try. go, they, spend the 10 pounds, which is probably, um, 11 or 12 us and, uh, and give it a shot because this is really such an important part of, of the work of healing and getting better. I love the, actually before we end, I do want to come back to what you said about that, which is, you know, this journey being one of healing and less about resolution of symptoms. Yeah, absolutely. And actually,

33:35

Healing I see as fundamentally a form of evolution into a depth of self-knowing and a freedom in the self. And that's why I think that program's for anyone. I've designed it for people with CFS and ME because that's what I understand, right? That's my own, but actually it's life-changing stuff for anyone. These are skills that once mastered are life-transforming skills because they give you such self-agency, such efficacy, such choicefulness.

34:04

but it's not brassy, it's not hard, it's not salesy, it's just coming into capacities that enable you to make different choices, have different experiences and practice different awarenesses so that you show up in a kind of healed way, which is a beautiful thing. I think it was Ram Dass who said, it's kind of the journey of being human is about learning to be the kind of atmosphere of love in which people can come up for air if they need to. And I always think that's a very beautiful aspiration.

34:34

And the evolution of the self, feel is the heart of the spiritual journey. It's about letting go of all the crap that we project onto other people, letting go of our reactivities, letting go of all the kind of clenching and grasping that we do in the self to become a much more oceanic, spacious, present, contoured, real gift in people's lives and our own. So why do you think that people get ME-CFS?

35:04

I think there are a host of reasons, Evan. I think it's multifactorial and a complex condition. At heart, I think it's a fundamental mismatch between the evolutionary needs of an ancient body and a contemporary world that internalizes and lives at the speed of capitalism with all that goes with it. Junk food, junk lighting, insane levels of drip, drip, drip stress that the human body didn't evolve for.

35:30

We know that we want a flexible neurological response. We want to be able to go sympathetic. We want to be able to go parasympathetic. We want it to be flexible because we need that. But people are stuck in sympathetic arousal because of the stresses. And then on the top of that, you've got toxic chemicals, metals. This is your territory molds, foods that aren't really foods. They're just toxin delivery systems. Plus we're not living in intelligent relationship with light, with

35:59

the earth with water, there's so many things that we're just getting wrong. And I don't think of it as a dysfunctional thing when we get ill with ME-CFS. I think it's highly functional. When people talk about mitochondrial dysfunction, I think, no, they're not dysfunctional. They're actually doing what they were designed to do and they're giving us feedback, right? They're intelligently communicating. And so I think we have to change our whole framework, our whole perception of it.

36:28

and really come back to the body as this very, very intelligent communicative system. And it's complex and multilayered and so is the illness because there are so many different ways that the body isn't being cared for. And it will be unique in every case, although there are general patterns that will almost always apply. So it's a message from the body. And because of society, we can't necessarily listen because essentially, like you said, with mitochondrial dysfunction,

36:55

mitochondria just go in quiescent. They're saying, I'm overwhelmed. We just need to relax and we need to sleep. And society says, yeah, but you can't do that. Yeah, exactly. And we call it dysfunctional. Why? Because there's this commander in the brain that goes, but I want to do this and you're not doing what I want. You're not doing what I want you to do. They're not dysfunctional. They are more intelligent and older in some ways than we are. They were around for billions of years, know, millions of evolutionary years before.

37:24

there was ever a human form. So I think it behoves us to be humble in the face of these incredible ancient intelligences and to learn from them. But how do you navigate that? OK, the mitochondria need to sleep and I need to go to work so that I can provide for my family. I think that comes down to those iterative life practices. Good circadian biology, good clean eating and the rest of it.

37:54

mitochondrial biogenesis, know, cold exposure, exercise, movement, light, all the things that they need. Then there's some confluence between mitochondrial health and going to work, right? If you invest in the health of the system that the mitochondria are tending in ways that mitochondria need you to do so. When it comes to that direct clash, it's kind of too late. And you've got to start going down through the layers and shifting the overall direction of the system because

38:22

It's a complex system. It's going to have numerous tipping points to get back to homeostasis. And we don't always know what they are, but we certainly know what many of them are. We can't always say what the final key is. We can sometimes, we can't always, but there are certain fundamentals that every human life needs. Good sleep, movement, adequate nutrition, hydration, social connection, a sense of hope and purpose.

38:52

a flexible nervous system response, the capacity to handle discomfort. All those things add up to a life well lived capaciously.

39:02

Very well said. And I love the fact that you said the ability to handle discomfort because that's something that I've learned in my use of psychedelics as part of my personal evolution, is that being able to sit with discomfort has lots of benefits. Yeah, huge. Absolutely. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think it's an incredibly underrated skill.

39:31

Yeah, we're running away from our sensations way too often. Way too often. Yeah. And that's guaranteed sickness down the line if we keep suppressing sensations because we don't, because we, whatever that means, don't like them. Far better to just be the field of awareness in which they arrive as phenomena and to allow them to pass through. mean, states pass in 90 seconds. We know that. Unless we're looping with a story, it's 90 seconds of discomfort.

39:59

And yeah, maybe some of the energies get white hot before they move through. That's fine. We know that. Then it transmutes into something much more joyful.

40:08

So what do you think it's going to take, Anna, to put this into the elementary school curriculum? Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. I'm going to be writing a book, which I'm hoping I can get in front of health officials and people like that eventually. But I think there's a growing awareness of this, isn't there, Evan? There are more and more people looking at what we could call a new biology.

40:36

moving away from the old Cartesian mind-body split paradigm, which is subtly rehabilitated in some mind-body approaches. I often criticise that because I don't want to rehabilitate that hyphenation in any way. It's never separated. Mind is body, body is mind. We can discern between certain functions, but it's all one system, right? And I think that's important to grasp because when we grasp that, we can do more justice to what's going on.

41:04

So if someone's got an emotional problem, it might not be what's going on in their head. It might be what's going on in their gut. But by thinking about it as a mental problem and splitting it off and trying to command the body with, know, just command the body through the mind and not look at the materiality of what's happening, we shut off solutions that way. Now, I know your work is very rich because I know that you get into all the material sources of the condition and you have the big five and...

41:33

all of that. And so it's very inclusive. And I know also that you're very systematic, which is wonderful because I truly believe we have to start with some basic layers like sleep. Sleep is always my first go-to with people. Dial that in and you change so much. And then you've got kind of incremental positive improvements that you can draw their attention to. And that inspires them then to take another step. And so it goes on over time and it's not a quick fix because time is in the body.

42:03

Brilliant. Anna, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been wonderful. That's my pleasure. And I look forward to seeing you soon. I'm sure you will, Evan. Take good care. So if you have chronic fatigue, whether it's from long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome, go ahead and click the link below to watch my latest master class, where I go deep into our four step process that has helped thousands of others resolve their symptoms naturally.

42:32

After you watch that video, if you're interested in seeing if we're a good fit to work together, you can then get on a free call with me. All right. Thanks so much. I'll see you over there.