Dr. Victoria Maizes
Hi, Andy.

Dr. Andrew Weil
Hi Victoria.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
We often talk about mind body medicine. Today we're going to talk about body mind medicine with the founder of trauma releasing exercises, Dr. David Bocelli.

Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, I am really looking forward to this. I'm a great admirer of his work.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
Let's get him on.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
Dr. David Purcell is an internationally renowned author, presenter and trainer who focuses on trauma intervention, stress reduction and resiliency and recovery training. He has lived and worked in war torn countries and natural disaster zones around the world. Dr. Berceli is the creator of Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises, or TRE. He's the author of three books and currently teaches trauma recovery in 50 countries and provides relief services through his nonprofit organization to survivors of natural and human made disasters around the world. Welcome, David.

David Berceli
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
We're delighted to have you. And I thought we could start by having you describe what neurogenic tremors are and how you first witnessed them in children in bomb shelters.

David Berceli
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because it was sort of simplifying my observation, something that we see all the time. All of us will recognize that somebody's got nervous or afraid their hand might shake or their voice might quiver if they're giving a speech or their legs might shake if they're standing in front of a podium, that sort of thing.

So we recognize that shaking, our only problem is, is that the narrative we have is that due to nervousness and we negate the narrative, it means we're afraid where we were vulnerable, we're insecure. Nowhere do we have a narrative that says, all the shaking means you're discharging an excited energy charge. So when I was living in War and saw I saw this and experienced it myself all the time because it was repeated over and over, almost like I was forced to look at it from a different perspective.

And that perspective was, could this possibly or potentially be helping us survive the overexcited state of living in a war zone?

And so that became most apparent when I was in a bomb shelter, and I had two children and they were sitting on my laps. I was holding them. I had my hands on their backs, and I could feel them trembling with terror in their body.

And it was fascinating, actually. But when I looked around the room, all of the small children were trembling quite freely. They had no inhibition to do it. And then I looked at the teenagers around 11, 12, 13 years old. I could see they were shaking, but they were trying to control it. A lot of the adults were shaking, and right, there was a real eye opener for me that in the children I'm seeing, the natural state of the human organism, and it tremors deliberately for a purpose.

And the purpose was to somehow reduce the anxiety and the fear. But we train ourselves out of it as adults because of this negative narrative we have around it. And it's the same as crying. A two year old will cry, hurt their knee and cry freely. An 11 year old might start to cry, but they'll try to hold it back, and adults can fall and break their knee and not cry.

Because we have narratives that suggest those are appropriate behaviors or actions. So that was the first thing when I saw the tremor mechanism, and then I began to ask myself, well, how do how could we evoke that potentially in the human body? Is it that good for us? And it's genetically encoded in us. We should have easy access to it.

And that's what trauma releasing exercises are about. They give the person easy access to activate this natural tremor mechanism and reduce stress in the body.

Dr. Andrew Weil
When I first heard you talk about this you showed some videos of animals tremoring which I found fascinating. Could you say something about that?

David Berceli
Yeah, well, as far as we know, every mammal species tremors. And through several books that I've been reading, actually, mammals in the wild tremor very regularly. And they don't suffer from post-traumatic stress, whereas domesticated animals do suffer from post-traumatic stress, which is quite interesting. But if you read about animals trembling, it is nothing but a self-regulating mechanism. So if a mammal is chased by a tiger as an example, their everything will go up.

David Berceli
The heart rate, blood pressure, their respiration and their nervous system will highly activate and that will help them survive. But then when they're over by the water pool and there's no threat, they begin to tremor. And it actually down regulates the heart rate, blood pressure, nervous system. They all come down and the animal goes back to normal again.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
Andy, you've often spoken and written about the innate ability of the human body to heal. And I'm wondering whether, seen through that lens, you might want to add something about this, seemingly genetically encoded, ability that David's pointing to.

Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, it certainly seems like it's a way that the body has of discharging, accumulated energy that would be harmful if it stayed in the body. And, and David then found ways of inducing this in people fairly simply.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
It is amazingly simple in some ways. And, David, besides your books, you also have some YouTube. So it makes me want to ask you this question of can people do it on their own or they need to be taught?

David Berceli
Yeah, but I actually believe that because it's a genetically encoding in us, every human being has the right to access this, the right to get it for free. You don’t have to pay my book, or they have to get a YouTube video or something. But yes, I believe they can access it easily by themselves. It's a simple routine.

David Berceli
The difficulty would be is if they do have high trauma experiences that are unresolved, those could easily be, evoked if you will, or released from the body. And for that reason, then they might need someone to guide them through that process of therapy, not necessarily guiding them through the process of triggering the body, does it genetically by itself.

So they might need some regulation. But I believe that every human being has a right to have access to this, if it belongs to us. And one of the reasons I made this our work so hard to get it so simple is I in warzones or in, situations of natural disasters, I'm working with hundreds of people at a time, and so you can't just do individual sort of clinical techniques with them.

David Berceli
You have to do something where100 people can follow you, and all of them can activate the tremor mechanism. And all of them take it up in their own individual way according to the traumas or tension patterns that they hold in their bodies.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
So doing it in a very large group, though, may also on some level have the community support piece. Right? Like what is it like for someone with PTSD who learns about this and attempts to do it on their own, or someone who's experienced, sexual abuse, who then attempts to do this on their own? Are there any, like, you know, warnings that you'd give?

David Berceli
Yeah, the warnings I would give is if it begins to overwhelm you from your trauma past, then you definitely need someone to be with you. Now, that doesn't always mean a therapist. It could mean a spouse, a partner, a close friend. It really means someone that you feel safe with. But that's the person that you would want to work with.

But when I work in a natural disaster zone as an example, everyone went through the same trauma. Over 100 people all trembling together and I just tell them it's the person next to you starts to cry or get afraid, reach over and grab their hand, give them support because we all experienced the exact same trauma. We know what we're going through and it works really well because it does build a community and from just one experience, a whole family or maybe a support group might end up doing this regularly because they know now, okay, this is simple, easy, but our trauma is going to come out. But we know how to hold each other and help each other, which is precisely what large populations need. They need to heal as a community rather than as individuals.

Dr. Andrew Weil
Victoria, we've had David come several times to teach this method to our classes of Fellows. So, I have observed some of these. You've probably observed more of them, or we've had groups of anywhere from 50 to 80, physicians lying on the floor and, following David's instructions, what's your sense of how this has worked in that community of relatively similar people?

Dr. Victoria Maizes
It's amazing how powerful most of the Fellows find it. And there is always a subgroup who say they can't tremor and that may be, you know, how inhibited we all are. And certainly when you're trained as a physician, sometimes you have more armoring that makes it harder to perhaps let go and do that and be vulnerable in that group setting.

But I can't tell you how many people have said this was incredibly powerful. And from that one experience, they then go home and they teach it to their children, and they start being able to recommend it to, patients especially, I would say, people who, in addition to trauma, people with autonomic dysregulation seem to be another group that do really well with it.

David Berceli
What I saw in your group and I'm going to back you up, Victoria, first of all, as far as I understand, this is a genetically encoded mechanism in the nervous system for a very specific purpose or several purposes, actually, because it reduces tightness in the muscle tissue and fascia patterns, it can actually realign if there's problems in the spinal column or the hips.
Only because it loosens up the tightness that's, that's been held for some reason. But what I find when somebody says I can't tremor, I know that they can. That would be an impossibility, that one human being on the planet can't tremor. So I, I just know that there's some sort of resistance. It's obviously unconscious and they don't have any particular meaning that they're trying to hold on.

There's just a an unconscious resistance to letting go of control. That's usually the biggest issue I find. But when I worked with people like that over several times, they did eventually tremor. I think once they felt a little safer, or they could feel what I always tell them. This mechanism is a paradox. You are in control of an out of control experience because you can stop at any time you want.

You can start it and stop it. But once you start it, it's kind of out of your ego's control. And so when they get that, that they can move back and forth between controlling and not controlling, I find that they get it much easier.

Dr. Andrew Weil
What I find so appealing about this method, is that it's so accessible, it requires no equipment. It is so simple. It's so effective, it is so cost effective. And it's even, I think, fun to do. So. It's the perfect. It's the perfect intervention.

David Berceli
Yeah. I agree with you. All of those things you just said. That's what I was confronted with when I was living in war, living in poverty, living in, natural disaster zones. They had no money. They couldn't buy anything. I couldn't sell them something that like a little or something that they might need. They only had their body and some of them had a floor.
Not all of them had floors so we just laid on the ground that it was that exactly, Andrew that I had to face, like, how do I help this entire population without, demanding anything from them, but just giving them a self-help technique? And, and that forced me to have to think in a simple way.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
I'd love to have you, if you can dissect it a bit. You know, in addition to having a master's and a PhD in social work, you are also a certified massage therapist, a bio energetic therapist, a neuro therapy instructor. And just a moment ago you spoke about the muscles, the fascia. We've been talking about the nervous system. What do you think is happening physiologically? Is it across all of those structural systems? Is it something else?

David Berceli
Now I'm convinced it goes. It's from the nervous system. The nervous system is interconnect it to all of these other systems. It would be an impossibility for it not to affect all the systems in the in the human body. And that includes the gastrointestinal systems, everything the stomach, in the pelvis, all of the organs, everything begins to be adjusted.

David Berceli
If you start taking out tightness in the structure, blood flow may improve, quite well, and the nervous system will calm down. The heart rate will change it. It has to be inclusive of everything. I think that's what it's for, is one inclusive, process with the nervous system that affects every part of the human body.

Dr. Andrew Weil
Would you describe for our listeners the method of how you induce this in most people?

David Berceli
Yeah. The easiest description would be is the last exercise that we do. Although I teach seven of them, I always do the last one because that's most easily evokes the tremor mechanism. All they have to do is lay down on their back, put the bottoms of their feet together, let their knees fall open, sort of like the butterfly or the frog position in yoga. Many people are familiar with that. They just lay there and let their adductor muscles, which are in the inner thigh, let them just stretch for about a minute passively just by laying in the position. Then what they do, which really seems to help generate the shaking, is pick their pelvis up off the ground as far as they are comfortable doing that.

So the knees are open, the pelvis is up and they stay there for about 1 to 2 minutes. And what happens? It seems to begin to dislodge the tight holding pattern that people generally are in the human body. So all of our different tight patterns are being challenged by that position because it's an unusual position. So them, when they sit there, pelvis back down, what they'll do is lay again for about another minute just passively with the knees open.

Then all have them close their knees the tiniest little bit, not more than an inch, and stay in that position for about two minutes, and they'll start to feel the trauma on the inner thigh. That's usually where it begins. Then I have them close their knees again, just an inch for another two minutes, until finally their knees are fairly upright and they can turn their feet flat on the floor and the tremor is just activated.

Now all they do is lay passively, because it seems to have the capacity that it moves through this structure. So it will go from the legs, through the psoas muscle it appears. Through the pelvis into the spinal column or the the lung muscles along the spine. And it'll start just shaking tightness out of the body. So it's really it's the opposite of the fetal position.

That's the best I could describe it. The fetal response is closing up, closing the knees and bending forward. The technique to activate the shaking would be almost to like show the body that you're safe. And that would be opening the legs, picking up the pelvis, lying flat. So the whole body is exposed in a sense. And that somehow is an indicator for this tremor mechanism to seem to activate.

Dr. Andrew Weil
And how long would you let a person do this?

David Berceli
I tell them first to tremor for about 15 minutes, as long as they don't have any pain or cycle emotional issues surfacing, just tremor. They're just experiencing it. Then I tell them, do this about every other day for about two weeks and then find your own level of comfort, because some people can tremor for a half an hour, because they can feel it's doing something deep inside.

They've been wanting to get through whatever painful place they've been trying to get through, and they can feel the tremor mechanism is doing it. Some people can only tremor for two minutes. As an example, Victoria, you talked about what if they had sexual abuse? Well, opening the knees and picking the pelvis up is terribly vulnerable for a person like that.

And so they might want to only tremor two minutes at a time. But if they do that successfully every time without going into their trauma, eventually that time will expand itself.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
And what about the duration you gave for an individual session? But is this something that you do periodically? Is this something that you do the rest of your life every day? What do you usually recommend?

David Berceli
Well, I tell people this and they don't like to hear it. And Andrew, you know, why do you have to do it for the rest of your life? It's no different than saying eating a healthy diet or whatever. I would do it for the rest of your life. My theory is, is if this is part of our genetic encoding, it should be able to access it for the rest of your life.

Because we don't know when I'm going to be in the next car accident, or when I'm going to get a divorce or whatever trauma is going to come in the future. I still want this mechanism available to use it for that time, and the more that I use it regularly, maybe even once or twice a week, is all you have to do for five minutes.

Just keep it activated. When a trauma does occur or anxiety or tension, your body will immediately start to tremor itself, indicating to you, okay, our stress level has risen. We got to drop it down a little bit.

Dr. Andrew Weil
If someone wants to explore this or try it, where do you send them?

David Berceli
They can go to my, YouTube channel, my website there. Lots of places. David Berceli is my YouTube channel. They can go to Instagram. That's also David Berceli. They'll see a lot of people doing TRE. I guide people through it. And then I educate people. Look, here's how this body is shaking. Here's what I think is going on, and here's the intervention we're going to make to see if we can help move the tremors through the body.

So in that sense, it's very educational. The website trauma prevention.com is the website where there has a link to do the exercises for free and how you do them.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
So I want to say in preparation for this podcast, I did, go on, your YouTube station and watch you instruct a young man who, was very fit, which, you then suggested to him that he was going to have to lift his pelvis a little higher to fatigue his muscles because his muscles were very strong.

And then I was really aware of the way in which you were observing him and noticing. Oh, you know, it seems like your shoulder needs to let go a little bit. And so what is the power of the observer if you are lucky enough to have a one on one session?

David Berceli
Yeah, unfortunately that seems to be very important. And I say unfortunate because I only got this power of observation by working with thousands of people. So that's nothing I can actually teach. I have to actually see the body itself and say, oh, I can see where the problem is because I know anatomy so well. I could say, oh, there's something wrong there.

And so the same thing, I had to learn this. I worked with a lot of military, with a lot of veterans, Navy Seals, Army Rangers, really hard core military people, and they are so controlled and so tight. I had to force them. Like you said, move your pelvis up higher, hold it harder, longer so that we can break through their holding pattern which is really tight see, I wouldn't do that for an 80 year old person. But for these people, because I, I could observe that in the position he was in, he could have stayed there for 30 minutes and nothing would have happened. I had to push a little bit harder. So the observer is very important, and that's what the TRE training is about on our website.

You have a lot of people all over the world that are certified, what we call providers of treat their job really is to observe your body and to help you move the tremor in through your structure.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
Well, I'm glad, that you pointed to the training that people can get. I want to go back to something else you said, which is, this concept of feeling safe in your body. And, Stephen Porges, who has written about polyvagal theory and, vulnerability and resiliency, he has this lovely phrase that, resiliency is about feeling safe in your body. And I wonder if you could comment on that.

David Berceli
Yeah, I agree 100% with all of his work I think is great. And it is safety. But what's fascinating about me is we can start by accessing a person. Where do you feel safe in your body? Where do you not feel safe in your body? We draw their attention to a place of safety, and I'm doing this throughout the whole session often.

Do you still feel comfortable? Do you feel safe? And it surprises me how how much safety people really do have in their bodies, but they're not aware of it until you bring it to their attention. So when I work with, women who had been sexually abused or even men who had been sexually abused, and so I have them maybe open their knees and say, now, I just want you to stay there for 10s and then you're going to close them again, and then we're going to see where do you feel safe, what angle do you feel safe that so brings their attention to that?

Now this is when I'm working with severe trauma and individuals. I don't do this with large groups. I might tell I do tell all large groups if anybody feels unsafe or you're in pain, stop immediately, raise your hand and I'll be able to come to you and help you. So I do sort of watch to help people regulate, but honestly, I'm really surprised and impressed how much people can self-regulate, even just by me talking about the self-regulation and safety. They seem to pick it up and they feel safer just for that reason.

Dr. Andrew Weil
Do you find the interest in and acceptance of trauma release among, neuroscientists and neurologists? Are they open to it, or are they interested in it?

David Berceli
Okay, I'll tell you a funny story, but I will tell you they're not exactly open to it. I've taught a lot of neurologists. We do have some neurologists in the TRE field. They're trained, certified, etc. but I was teaching at Walter Reed Army Hospital one time. Two neurologists were in this group that I was teaching medical doctors. So they lay down and at first I told them what I was going to do, and they said, there's no way you're going to do that.

They just did not believe that at all. They say all right. Well, let's go try. So we lay down in the yoga room that they had and, of course, they activated the tremors. And we wanted them to say to the other one, what the hell is this? How is this happening? It's so they were completely confused because the field of neurology does not teach this at all.

And so when they have a physical experience that they can't explain, that they can clearly tell this is my nervous system. This is my body doing something to me. They're completely confused. Now, what baffles me is when I do teach neurologists and they're confused, but they refuse to research it, that I don't understand it because I thought research was about things that we don't know.

Dr. Andrew Weil
The same field.

David Berceli
Yeah. Yes, I know you do. And yes.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
So and you speak a lot about mind-body medicine and this is what we might call body-mind medicine. Do you want to say a word about body mind medicine?

Dr. Andrew Weil
Well, you can't separate the mind and body except verbally. There are two poles of the same thing. And I think that's the great limitation of conventional medicine, is that it doesn't recognize that unity. And, this is a perfect example of how something going on in the body is happening in the mind as well. And you can take advantage of that connection.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
How about you, David?

David Berceli
Yeah, I would say the same thing. I tell them you're just going to lay there, your body's going to activate you. And then if some thought needs to come up, it will come up naturally. And what I find 90% of the time is not the trauma comes up, but a calmness comes over the person and it actually helps them to access the trauma.

Without the high activation of it. It's almost like it's a story now rather than it's a, it's still activated event in the person's mind. And so I think using the body, at least in this way, I find it really does calm down the mind and give them easier access into some of their traumas.

Dr. Andrew Weil
Well think it's a brilliant method and you are to be congratulated on the one teaching people about it, I think it's wonderful.

David Berceli
Thank you, Andrew.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
And I want to second what Andy said. Your work is so inspiring. And the fact that you have brought it to war torn countries and people who have experienced disasters and that it is free and accessible. People can use it and make such a difference in their lives. Thank you.

David Berceli
Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate all of you and everything that you, you people are doing. And I appreciate the invitation even to come and teach there. So it's exactly what I, I wanted to do is just give it to people and then say it's yours, you move it forward from now.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
So and we do have a few neurologists.

David Berceli
That those neurologists to do some research.

Dr. Victoria Maizes
Yeah. Thank you so much.

David Berceli
Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation to talk with you.