Mind Body Medicine with Karden Rabin

Welcome back to the doctor body mindful podcast. My name is Dr. Jude. And this is a podcast which explores how we can integrate modern medicine and alternative therapies to help you get the holistic health care that you deserve. I will be speaking to healers and seekers, researchers and authors who will share their experiences and the evidence to help guide us all to Holistic Health. Let's do this Karden Rabin is co founder of CFS girl who is as big of a geek when it comes to mind body research as me. He is a regular contributor to Bessel vandal Kirk's trauma Research Foundation. Having worked in bodywork for the past 15 years, he now specializes in somatic experiencing, and the cycle emotional aspects of chronic pain. Well, Karden, welcome. I do. This conversation has been a long time and a long time coming, I think, hasn't it?

It has it has I think actually, we we first reached out to one another a year ago. That sounds like so I don't I don't remember the time I remember the weather. Right. And it was warm.

Yeah, it was. It was it was about a year ago. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And then we actually spoke for the first time in winter. I remember that. And I've since had Jen on the podcast. And she really went through, she introduced us to CFS school. And Jen is your co founder to this whole venture. And I really wanted to get you on to the podcast as well, because you bring a really different perspective to your approach. And I really love the the geeky, science based kind of thought process that you really can explain so well. And that's what I really want to get into. On this episode today is can you take me through the core tenants of the CSF school, and really why you chose to focus on them and go into the science that underpins those tenants?

Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. So, so let's have all the listeners, I don't know, grab their tea or their coffee. And I, I'll do my I tend not to be boring. So hopefully this won't be boring. You know, I think it should be an interesting thing. Do you think we can go from like, from front to back? Right, like talking about like, you know, when most people start getting interested in this work, it's because they're sick, right? Something's wrong. And for the sake of today's conversation, we can go right into like presuming that someone listening to this podcast, has chronic has been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, am II fibromyalgia, right. And they are dealing with a very confusing host of symptoms, right? At the very least they're dealing with fatigue, right? It's like, Oh, my God, like, I can't believe my body weighs a million pounds. And even the idea of like, going from my bedroom to the bathroom is almost inconceivable, right? I think that's an insane thing to be experiencing. Right? And simultaneously, they might have other weird symptoms where after they do a small amount of activity, they crash and they feel really bad. Their heart might be doing weird thing is beating too much right? Being too little. If you've got fibromyalgia, you've got like weird pain everywhere. And it's like, Why does my body hurt? And all that's really weird. And if you're fortunate enough, you do go to a doctor who at least gives you a label. They say you've got this a syndrome title, an itis title, an alga title, which, you know, as you Jude know more than anyone it's it's not actually a diagnosis. It's a label for a collection of symptoms, that medicine doesn't know why is happening. Right?

You're very much right a syndrome is exactly that. So any syndrome that we are calling a syndrome is just a collection of symptoms that tend to arise or occur together. And it's very often that it's unclear as to why they have they occur in that way. And there. I was revising you know really carefully about chronic fatigue syndrome just the other day and it's quite sad to To still be so unclear on the pathophysiology, or the origins or the the underlying mechanisms. And how little of that is understood from the medical perspective. So you're absolutely right. We don't know why these symptoms occur together. When they do occur together, we labeled them as chronic fatigue syndrome. But that's all that that label is suggesting. They're this group of symptoms that occur together.

Yeah, so thanks for you know, really dialing that in. And, and then furthermore, right? Physicians all do want to help, right? They got into the end, they got into it, because they care about people. Yeah, they're going to help based on the knowledge base and training that they have. And so if I were to compare this to I just had a fire at a building that I own, and we had to repair it. And so you know, there's the general contractor, and the general contractor, most of them are usually they're mainly carpenters, right. They know how to frame out structures, they know how to set up the skeleton, they know how to hand sheet rocks, but most GCS don't do heating, ventilation and air conditioning. They don't do electric, they don't do plumbing, it's not their wheels, right? They don't have those knowledge sets. And if we take you know, you're a physician, someone comes into you with chronic fatigue. So don't get these weird syndromes, you're going to do what you do, let's call a doctor, a general practitioner or carpenter for a lot, they're gonna take Bloods, right, they're gonna write there might do an x ray, they might do an MRI, they're looking at the things they know how to look at blood chemistry. Bones, again, really out there with an MRI, maybe they're trying to see what's going on with the brain or some other things. You do a bit work, maybe a handful of other things that are in that normal physician carpenter toolbox.

The reception just dodged out for a second, which is why that was that was unclear. When you asked him for suggestions on what else you might do,

yeah, like, what if I have CFS, and I'm going to my GP, what else might they try to look at?

So I mean, I think they'll refer you to a neurologist, I think they might refer them, they may do muscle testing. So they may be testing your muscles, which may include a biopsy. The process of with that which a doctor is going to be working you up is going to be with the intent of excluding other conditions, because this is a diagnosis of exclusion. So we are looking for any organic, what we call organic causes for fatigue. And we're doing that as you, as you said, through blood tests, you'll be referred to a neurologist you'll be and you and you may be referred to a rheumatologist all looking for evidence of autoimmune disease, as I see you make it your muscles tested, you most certainly will get an MRI. And all of these approaches are looking to exclude other pathology.

Yeah, I love that. So so to get to the to the meat of this, folks, if we're to go into our building analogy, right, and my lights which won't turn off, right, a light switch won't be activating life. And if I call my current lead, also, in this analogy, pretend that nobody knows. There's nobody knows what electricity is, okay? There's a light switch. There's light that won't turn on. Nobody knows that electricity is. So you call your carpenter and say, Hey, this, this switch, which used to turn on this light isn't working anymore. The carpenter comes over and says, Oh, well, it seems to be in the wall. Okay, it goes up and down like it should. I'm sorry, I don't think there's anything wrong with you. Maybe that light never fucking turned on. And maybe you're hallucinating. Right? Carpenter comes in doesn't know how to handle. Right? So you call the plumber. Right? The Plumber comes in. And granted, there's no water around this thing. But the load line, I'll be like, Well, it seems like the copper pipes over here and the drain over there that don't even have anything to do it. lacing fine. I don't know what could be wrong. Right? People are coming in and looking at someone who's sick with CFS with what they know. And you brought up a neurologist Dude, this is this thing that I explodes my fucking brain with incredulity and anger because Ph D. M D into RA neurologists are extraordinarily well educated people. But they're still looking at the nervous system like Neanderthals. And what do I mean? If you go to a neurologist pain management doctor, the primary thing they're doing is looking for, quote, inflamed nerves, right? Or areas of compression where a bone meets a bone and a nerve might be irritated. Okay. So these people with radical education shins are still basically going through, there's two parts of something rubbing against each other, that might be the cause of the pain. And I'm going to inject it with a steroid. That's like the state of the art of a neurologist pain management technique, right? Or I'm just gonna flood you with oral steroids. Like all of this education comes down to this touch that it will caught me make it cool. Hopefully you're better. That's bananas. Because what's you're implying, guys? And what's different about CFS school? What's different about mind body practitioners? What's different about people who are understanding the nervous system is that it's not so much about the structure of the nerve, meaning like, where's it traveling, and if it's being squished dies, it's about the information being transmitted in the bloody nerves. Right? Give me one more example. Imagine aliens came to planet Earth and saw satellites themselves phone towers and cables and fiber optic networks. And they're like, Oh, I bet this is used for something. But those aliens never got inside of it. They never saw the internet, they never saw YouTube, they never saw Reddit, they never saw Instagram, they'd have zero clue to what the system was actually for. They just see pipes and conduits and broadcasts, they'd understand that if one of those pipes were cut, that part wouldn't work. But they still would have no context or the inflammation running through it. And so what we're dealing here with folks is when you have this constellation of weird syndromes, and we look into your blood chemistry or your bones or see if there's a nerve pitching, that's all like remarkably rudimentary, that's all super missing the mark, that's the carpenter wondering why the light switches, right? And what you really need as an electrician, and a software engineer of the mind and the body of the brain of the nervous system and says, Why is the brain and the nervous system doing what it's doing? Why is the brain and the nervous system directing this body to be so exhausted? Why is the brain and the nervous system reacting, so chaotically? To trying to exercise? Why is the brain and the nervous system, creating pain in various regions of my body for no particularly observable reason? And when you start asking those questions, rather than being like, I don't know, small, you get very different lines and scientific inquiry, when you get very different lines of therapeutic intervention.

I love these metaphors and analogies, because they do allow a degree of that, well, I think it just underpins the whole problem, I think we have as in our healthcare system, which is just operating within our own silos, and actually, each contractor not being aware of what the other one can do. And so it can become really isolating for anyone who's actually trying to fix the overall problem. So what I'm trying to address with dodge body mind soul really is to actually get an overview about all the different approaches that are available in in managing these problems. Because as a doctor myself, I'm totally guilty of being a product of my own education and, and initially believing that this was the only way to be able to see or consider this particular problem. So it's really, it's really, it's a really easy way to understand the problems and then understand the solutions. So what what you're talking really about the problem being in the information that's being communicated from the brain to the body. There's a problem here, in what is not so much that the information isn't getting from A to B, there is communication from A to B, but the information that is being communicated is causing pain and dysfunction and huge radical shift in our the patient's overall state of well being.

Yeah, now, I've got some science for you now, because I know you want you want it to go. So and again, back Nord example. So we have CFS and basically means we have no energy. All right, so we're dealing with a no energy state. So let's bring in another parallel here, folks, which is I call it the US Essential by Mary or like the prime directive of your organism, guys, and your organism is what Jude and I will use as the language talk about everything, your brain, your nervous system, your cellular system, your organs, like just all of it, and take it from us that your organism doesn't separate itself into parts like us humans do, right? We don't. Our organism, right, my, my kneecap doesn't feel that it's different from my brain. It's just says this is us. So just put it there. That's why we're using this term organism. Your organism is, is fundamentally and evolutionarily completely organized around the logic of survival. A, B 01, black, white, is this going to kill me? Or is it going to feed me? Is this dangerous or not? That is the zero and one, those, that's the software building blocks of the entire operating system of your organism. So let's start there. Right? I said, when you start thinking about the information in the nervous system, you start asking different questions. But in order for your questions to make sense, you have to at least know the basics of what your organism is trying to do, which is as simple as it's trying to not die. And it's trying to live, that's always its organizing principle. Over millions of years of evolution, it has developed some a variety of strategies to execute the not dying goal, right. And those have come along for millions and millions of years. But folks, they boil down to anytime your organism perceives threats, lack of safety, scarcity, abuse, neglect, anything that's in the not good for me category. It responds with the fight or flight, which are the sympathetic the action responses of survival to one degree or another. It doesn't mean like, you know, when you're, when your boss is being mean to you that you punch him in the face or run away. But there might be some sympathetic activation fight flight response is one of the most primordial survival mechanisms that our organism does. Then even more primordial than that meaning proceeding that is the freeze response, or what we call tonic immobility. It's the parasympathetic route of survival, we inherited it from lizards, by the way, okay. And it says, I'm gonna survive by not moving. And by using less energy, whereas the sympathetic path, the fight flight says, I'm going to survive by getting the fuck out of here, and using a ton of energy. So logic in the nervous system, don't die, live, primary to primary behaviors are ways of ways to the organism to do that. Parasympathetic, freeze, energy conservation, sympathetic fight flow. Everyone with me so far, give me a head nod all the way in podcasting land. Now, in your ideal organism, you can't see this guy's but I'm making a wave with my hand, right? Like a parabola up and down, up and down. The nervous system is designed to go from sympathetic activation to parasympathetic activation, both and a survival instance in a regular day, right? When you get up to brush your teeth, you're going into sympathetic, right? You need some arousal. And then when you're taking a nap after lunch, siesta, you're going into parasympathetic, it's meant to go up and down, up and down. Is CSS. Usually what's happened for most people is that they're that logic of survival, that brain trying that organism trying to survive, has actually been in sympathetic mode. It's been an overdrive of vigilance and anxiety, a hardware. You very rarely meet people with CFS, who were doing nothing before they got sick. They were usually some kind of performer whether that was like, I mean, like they were they were working they were mother and kids. They were working they were in a Ph. D program they were in school they were pushing an athletic boundary they were doing all their things but they had like a death in the family a divorce a this like convergence when they really look back have many threats, right just from that that organism perceiving Danger, danger danger dangerous, and it went on for a long time. And their nervous system was in the sympathetic the fight or flight state for a while. Very simply put, guys, your remarkable organism can maintain that active that fight flight that high energy consumption response for quite a long time. But it was never designed to no other animal in nature is exposed to extended periods of danger and therefore high levels of neurological and physiological activation. Right? Most animals when they're under threat, they either live or die in moments. Right? Like the the tiger gets the Impala or it doesn't. And then the Impala because it's not a human being doesn't have anxiety about it for four months, it's just like, I'm not dead, great move on. Eventually, and this is what you see, people are in this state forever, a long time. And whether it be an athletic event, getting a Lyme infection, getting Epstein Barr getting COVID Getting a terrible stomach bug, some final threat, which people then see as the cause. But that's bullshit guys, that was just the last thing breaks the nervous system. And when I say breaks it, I mean, its capacity to maintain the sympathetic survival response fails, it just can't do it anymore. And we're not going to talk about this right now. But you can go do your own research guys on what's called the cell danger response. And the cell danger response shows that cells especially the mitochondria, exposed to perpetual amounts of threat and, and stress, which are the same word, by the way, guys, stress and threat are the same thing. Stress is just the, we'll get to that later. But they're the same thing. Those cells will eventually say, This is too much. And the word that we use, they go into energy conservation mode, they essentially default they can't maintain the sympathetic. So they're gonna go into the parasympathetic response, the freeze the tonic immobility, that, like almost kind of like hibernation, guys. In other words we use as torpor, it says, I still need to live, I'm following the prime directive, I can't die. But I have to choose a different strategy now. Because the other strategy, my physiology leader, really couldn't do any more. So I'm gonna pause there, because there's more of the story. But do you have any questions, thoughts, comments on that? Maybe insights on your side?

I have actually never heard CFS characterized in that way. So it's really interesting to hear almost like that. It being described as this almost hibernation or almost like a fawn response, this fawning this. This need to it's almost like fake dead, you know, they're making dead it's like, that's the sort of response that the, the body goes into. And it's really interesting that you mentioned and I'm not sure how far we want to go into it today. But we are mentioning this mitochondrial dysfunction. And I'm curious about your degree of of knowledge around the mitochondrial dysfunction and how that's approach

I'm gonna say right now about that is that my that like, my deep scientific knowledge of the mitochondrial dysfunction is low. But what I can tell you from helping well over 1000 people recover from CFS in a very short amount of time, is that the mitochondria is subservient to the nervous system, not the other way around, meaning that the mitochondria went into their deficiency, their energy conservation mode, their lack of function, because of the extended period of stress and the messages of the nervous system saying, work hard, work hard, work hard, work hard until collapse. So we don't treat mitochondria, we treat the brain and the nervous system in our program and the mitochondria start doing their job again. That's when I can sit. Again, it can get really deep. And we do know that epigenetically and inherently that mitochondria hold a lot of information and impact from previous generations. But again, from our empirical evidence and the effects of our program. Well, your mitochondrial inheritance is not a life sentence. That's what I'm gonna say for now. And you know, Judy, you're kind of talking about that kind of, you know, that torpor, that hibernation, I think a lot of people with CFS would say, it is kind of like a halflife. Right, that they're there. They're there on life support. They're still here, but they can't do much right. So that's what's going on. And to take it a little to just back up guys remember, what is the logic of your organism, the logic of your organism is not die. It views things around it as threats or stressors, same thing. All it has for millions of years of evolution are varying degrees of the fight flight and freeze response. There's also tendon Berhad, there are social responses as well, etc. But like it just had like, if you're a poker, you're playing five card stud, your nervous system, despite its incredible evolution still only has five basic parts. And it plays them in one combination or another. Now, once you get into the energy conservation mode, anyone who has CFS knows that when they try to do sympathetic activity when they try to go do something, right. And this is basically because the organism says the organism has strongly associated activity, any sympathetic activity, like doing the dishes, much less meeting a work deadline, as dangerous. It says, Oh, shit, we were sympathetic for years because we were surrounded by danger, then doing stuff doing too much made us sick, burn us out, I am never going to let you work again. Because we're going to die if you do that, right. That's now the current logic. And the first work of CFS school is to teach people how to teach their own nervous system, to uncouple. The relationship of sympathetic activity of doing work, and danger. And we do that through something we use brain retraining and something called State shifting, we start make helping the brain uncouple the idea that doing stuff is dangerous. And to couple it with positive states, whether that be joy, happiness, pleasure, fun, peace, calm, you name it, you can start making your brain have a different experience while doing a certain activity. Right. So we'll literally teach people to cultivate a state of let's say, fun or ease. And they'll deeply feel that state. And we say now, while holding that state in your body, we want you to visualize doing the dishes. And then as they practice that, guys, you can try this on your own, that we go obviously super in depth in our program, they start to teach their brain to couple a pleasurable state with the activity. And it creates kind of a door or a backdoor into sympathetic activity. Without the brand being like, oh, no, this is dangerous, we have to stop. So that's scratching the surface of what we're doing. We're using neuroplasticity and states, right to associate them with actions that were previously thought to be dangerous. And now they become safe as perceived by the organism. And you can then do the activity again, without your nervous system making you cry.

Unless interesting around what you've said there is around this what I'm interested in exploring is the theory that that that underpins the success of that decoupling, it really is based upon neuroplasticity and the science that we know surrounds chronic pain, again, another mind body condition, because these are really complex. Bio, so social cycle conditions and a lot of what we feel in our bodies relates to the narrative that we've subconsciously created around around it. And this is I use the word subconscious because a lot of people, as you say, have been driving themselves really hard before they get chronic fatigue syndrome. They tend to be quite type A personalities. They tend to be quite there's a lot of perfectionists in this group of people. And often this this strategy for surviving their early life has come from

those final psychosocial factors,

the biosocial, so the Bioceuticals It'll show. So bio psychosocial factors, which are often which are formed in early life as the new as the nervous system is developing.

Yes, and I think what Jake's pointing to, and when this finally dropped the word, we could use the word trauma, but essentially your childhood trauma. Or we could simply say, the, we also use the word attachment injuries, folks will maybe go into the distinction there, but the quality of your childhood, the quality of the relationship, safety, and effectiveness of your relationship with your primary caregivers, especially, especially your parents shape, how the brain and organism are going to interpret and navigate the world forever. So when we say when someone says I'm type A, although there may be some genetic predispositions to a certain type of type of way of being, when someone is a perfectionist, perfectionism is only developed as a coping mechanism for various deficiencies in attachment. In your development, when you're young, no child develops, things like having to be an A student in school, unless they subconsciously or their organism perceives that the only way they get approval or acknowledgement or attention is via that from their parents, right. I guess this is a long conversation, but there's a lot of work on this. But proper attachment is defined by your parents having an empathetic, supportive, loving and appropriate, like an attuned and understanding response to your needs, as a child, basically from in utero, through adolescence and beyond. And that means that like, when my daughter trips and scrapes her knee, the attune response as she's very upset and doesn't know how to comfort herself, is for me to come in and truly hold her, have my body comfort her body, wait until her nervous system comes down, look her in the eyes or just hold her back baby is okay. Things are validating her experience, right? Not being like, Oh, you just tripped. It's no big deal. Right? What you're literally in that moment, if you say you just tripped, it's no big deal. Your best of intentions might have had might be to have them get over it. But what you're actually teaching them is that their feelings aren't accurate, right? And that they might feel a little bit of shame, even though that's not what you meant to deliver. And then they're learning in that moment that they have to repress things like fear, sadness, expression, to make you happy as the parent. That's one little micro example, that happens 100 million 1000 times in development. And if you're, if those things are compromised, we get the platform for whether our nervous system can before I talked about that, that wave of going into sympathetic, parasympathetic, sympathetic or parasympathetic. Our capacity to have a pliable, flexible, adaptive, resilient nervous system is based on those development, developmental attachment. By the way, this also includes helping your child develop agency, right, where it's not just coddling, it's helping them safely take on challenges so that they expand and become braver, more courageous, more capable. That's the other side of it. But if that's done, right, you usually get people who don't get sick. Okay, that's done wrong. You have people who get sick, because that foundational Prime Directive of die don't die safe. Unsafe, is either working well or not working? Well,

either gets used or it's not so like things that you know, because we're, we're learning all the time. And our nervous system is learning all the time. And our immune system is then responding to those learnings all the time. So, you know, we're not born with fully mature nervous and immune systems, those develop in our early life, and they will respond to the messages that were being given consciously or subconsciously by those caregivers who are an extension of us and are co regulating us, consciously or unconsciously. And what I found really interesting today was reading a paper published by nature view article, looking at the impact of early childhood experiences on the development of our nervous and our immune systems, showing a general trend towards an pro inflammatory response in response to early childhood stressors, which then in some cases, lead in this, this paper was particularly looking at the impact on mental health. But then, and so depression and really sort of starting to recognize that some forms of depression are inflammatory. So it just is going to show that our early childhood experiences have a very real impact in the narrative that we are shaping around ourselves, and how important that narrative is in, in alerting our bodies and our minds. So it's about it's about the information flow, it's what that nervous system is actually the information that's being circulated. And so if the information we have learned to grew up with is things are unsafe, that are actually safe. And vice versa, we have a very confused nervous system, which then it's very difficult to navigate around the world in a sort of appropriate way. And therefore we we sort of either over respond to everything and become perfectionists and, you know, very stressed and highly anxious all the time, or we completely collapse and adopt, you know, need need to display sickness behaviors, and the only way that we can actually communicate our distress. So whether that's through biochemical signals of inflam, inflammation, which we're learning more and more, can be, are happening and are mediating the sickness behavior that we're displaying, in depression as an example. And although this wasn't mentioned, in the paper, specifically, I did get curious around chronic fatigue, being an example of sickness behavior, I mean, you've got the extreme fatigue, you, you're very sensitive to, you want to be in a in a dark, quiet room like that, you are displaying very clear sickness behavior, which is communicating to your people that you need help, when you cannot say that for yourself. And maybe don't want to say that for yourself, but my God, your body is saying it for you. So there's a growing, increasing, you know, body of evidence that's really describing how that's being biochemically mediated, which I think just for me, just adds this layer of like, you know, really real understanding about the importance of early life and these traumas that we experience and I just want to also Premise The fact that trauma can be such a loaded word. And AUMA you know, it's very overused. And we've got an actually your, your co founder, Jen, put, put something out on Instagram a couple of weeks ago, I think just delineating what big traumas and little traumas were. So yeah, where did just put search something to that around.

And that's why we also have like, you know, trauma and trauma and attachment injuries, we try to have these a wider array of language like, you might have not had a traumatic childhood. But if your childhood did have, for example, where because of my dad's temper, the expression of certain kinds of emotions, my nervous system interpreted as dangerous, because I'd get yelled at or it'd be terrifying even happen. You don't have to call it a trauma. But a lesson was deeply learned by your brain and organism, that I'm not allowed to feel that way. Because if I feel that way, bad things will happen. Right? And then it remembers that lesson for life. The other thing that I really want to offer now, because we've been talking about childhood traumas or childhood issues, it's where they all come from, but it's also not a life sentence. Right? The wonderful thing that's happening today, is it really the past two to three decades, we have developed effective therapeutic interventions that take advantage of psychological approaches, somatic embodied approaches that help the brain change that helps the brain unlearn right or rewire because it really is a lot of rewire that, you know, the famous neurological statement. nerves that fire together wire together neurons that fire together wire together, okay, and once an example of this is throughout childhood, if my nerves if my dad's temper, right, for example, every time it went off in regards to me, let's just say being sad like we don't cry. Well those nerves would have fired hundreds of times over and over again, if that happened, they would have wired together. At the same time, other people, for example, might want to take this in the difference that this is an example there's there's a cumulative wiring, but then there's acute wiring, right? If you get to a car accident, prior to that, you might have never been afraid of being in the car. Right? But all it took was one acute incident, to then maybe wire fear and you feel anxiety when you get into a motor vehicle, the same phenomenon, whether it be consistency, right, why firing wiring over and over again, every time my dad's temper went off, or acute learning like a car accident, the same phenomenon can be used to unlearn and relearn new neurological associations, right. This is the crux of the work to take the same material that create the obvious negative responses and use that same energy, same material material, same concepts of repetition and intensity or acuteness to start wiring differently, to start wiring in a way where a sense of actually being loved and accepted and that emotional expression is safe and not dangerous. That's what we help people to keep with particular types of techniques, practice in particular ways you can change the brain and the organisms habituated response to really everything and anything. Before you talked about the immune system, dude, and we were talking about mighty 100. Before I said before, that the mitochondria subservient to the nervous system, right? Similarly, the immune response is subservient to the brain in the organism. Just so you guys know, you know, scientists would definitely say, I don't know about that, but I'm gonna say it anyway. If you have an anxious hyper vigilant demeanor, okay, let's say, well, let's just go with type A, where your brain is constantly thinking about every task that comes your way. And anything that goes in your inbox gives you a jolt of anxiety. If you're basically spending your whole time looking for external threats, and responding aggressively to them. Then you're a little immune cells traveling through your blood, or doing the same fucking thing. I want you to imagine an immune cell that looks like a Pixar character of you. Okay? In the same way you're responding to emails and deadlines, and how to get the laundry done and what your husband said, those little immune cells are floating through your bloodstream being like, well, what's that? Oh, what's that? Oh, is that pilot? Right? It's those immune cells are are literally emulating the vibe of your overall brain nervous system. And then they themselves are responding inappropriately and aggressively to invite you to inane stimuli, right? Like gluten or whatever, and or your own bloody tissue. Now, there's scientific evidence to imply some support what I'm saying what I just said was a big, okay, Leap, leap, but it's literally very much how we were. And in CFS school, we do wonders with autoimmune conditions, because as the overall brain and organ, brain and organism are feeling safe, rather than endangered, all of their nervous systems confused and therefore their immune systems from pused or inappropriate responses start to heal and right.

It's really interesting because many autoimmune disorders are very often triggered in the same way or in very similar circumstances to chronic fatigue. So the major life event that normally is that last straw that breaks the camel's back. And when you go back into someone's history, there's there's been a pattern of just yes in nearly driving themselves.

You do a bio cycle, social history, bio, psychosocial history, trauma, intake, history, stress intake history. I love to see the statistics but um, I've never seen someone with these disorders that doesn't have that history.

What What interests me though, as well is the there are going to be many people that you don't see because obviously, you're going to be seeing a very skewed population, and you're actually seeing you're going to be seeing the affected individuals and There's going to be many people who have a similar history, but there's some sort of protective mechanisms that are, that are in place that I we don't know of that actually do not cause the cascade of whatever it is, you know, no one is actually clear of the biochemical or cascade, which begins it all, you know, begins it. Often there's a virus, which is really only the trigger, because the immune system is not responding in a healthy way. And as you've said, that's often in response to someone's nervous system being being tired, being tired. So a virus that the majority of people are going to fight off without even noticing they had it can be catastrophic symptoms in someone who

you know, when it like is a perfect example. It's like, if you look at Lyme disease, right, most people are going to blame the Lyme. Jen and I are not going to do that. We're going to ask, why is the Lyme proof? Why is the Lyme, kicking her butt? Right? Like, why is it her? Why isn't that person's immune system, able to do its job where software where you know, such a large percentage of everyone else who gets a Lyme infection or an Epstein Barr infection, fights it off, and they're back to normal? Right? Almost everyone who's gotten Epstein epstein barr, once they bounce back, they've got EDD in their body, you can measure it all the time, right? Similarly, people only get shingles. You know, once you have herpes, and you have shingles, right? That things in your body forever. But the only time it comes out and messes you up is usually after a lot of stressors or when your energy's really low. So to blame the virus, as opposed to blaming why your organism isn't successfully managing the virus are two very different therapeutic mindsets and approaches.

Yes. Can you tell me how you go about doing that? Because I know you're you come from a bodywork background. So what kind of body work are you using? And I'm also curious at what stage of illness someone can approach CFS girl. Yeah, those those questions have really come into my, to my head.

Yeah. Well, I start with the second question. Someone can come to CFS school. Basically, any stage of illness really, I mean, from really cute to mild, that the unfortunate thing is that they usually only find it as they're either a couple of months, or usually a couple of years down the rabbit hole of intervention that usually started with conventional medicine, right? Then they would have moved on to maybe functional medicine or other complementary forms as the opposite and stuff and come with me whether they got a little bit better or not, they're getting worse. And so you can find us and start using us anywhere in the process. But usually, people don't find this stuff until they have to find this stuff. So that's what I'd say about that. We have people who are completely bed bound to do our work. If you're in the midst of like acute infection, it's probably be difficult to do our work and you've got to stabilize to a mild degree before you can get into it. But as for the body work let me start here by my body work is still informed by that fundamental binary, safe or unsafe fight or flight dangerous or not dangerous. That's that's what it's driven by. And so my body work approach is really about using touch to help a brain and an organism a nervous system, start to feel safe, feel at ease, feel comfortable from the bottom up. Right. So again, it's awesome. It's still so much about safety. How can I help a nervous system get out of the danger response? Because I can help to get out of a dangerous spots. It will go into a healing response on its own. I'll say it again. If I can get it out of the danger response. It will go into a healing response. Right? I've said this before, like when you get shot, okay. Thank God a surgeon is there, too. I repair the tissue enough so you don't bleed out and die. Right. But once that's done, what the surgeon and that kind of ideal recovery wing of the hospital is done is it sets up an environment where you're safe and supportive for your own immune system to repair the tissue damage. That's how healing works. And even the best of medicine is supporting the body's ability to heal itself, we're just making sure it has that chance.

And I just, I just, can I just drive that point home. Because I think this is really important to understand what I'm what kind of blew my mind. I was when I was working in the intensive care department. So we're talking about the intensive care department. The work that is done in them in the intensive care department is simply supporting the body, while it heals itself. There's very few interventions that are done over and above that. So we are sometimes needing to take over well, if they're in the intensive care department, it's more often than not that we are supporting someone's breathing. So we may be breathing for them, we may be, we may be supporting their blood blood pressure. But whether or not that person is going to respond to any of those supportive measures, is totally dependent on whether their body responds to the illness. And that may be the degree to which we've caught it and and given antibiotics. But essentially, essentially, we are waiting for the body to heal itself. The body is such an incredibly intelligent regenerative organism, that even in the depths of conventional medicine, and you can't really get much deeper than then then then the intensive care department. The treatment that is given there is supportive treatment, in order for the body to have the time to heal.

Period. That's amazing. Yeah. So I hope everyone really absorbs that. And, and so then again, following that logic, and following everything we've been talking about, again, the question becomes, what are all the things I can do in my power, either as a teacher as a guide, and then again, in our work, you become what we call a self healer, in your power as the director of your brain, your nervous system in your organism? What are all the things I can do to support the the radical intelligence and self healing ability? And what I'm telling all of you guys right now? So whether you know it or not, if your brain and nervous system perceives itself to be in danger, over an extended period of time, it is not fucking healing. It's not. It's not. It's not, it's not. And so when again, when we go back to your original question about bodywork the primordial form of comfort and connection for a human being in utero and as babies touch. The primordial form of comfort and connection, the most foundational way of creating attachment and safety between a human being is being on their mother's chest. And universally the most soothing thing to any upset baby to their disturbed nervous system to their illness is connection with mother and breastfeed. By the way, there are some folks who because of the Trump childhood trauma they've had or adult trauma or abuse, touch has become dangerous. That's become a learned thing, right? Neurons that fire together wire together, what should be the best opportunity to connect into love and safety and feel at ease and held and, and achieving healing has unfortunately become polluted or contaminated by traumas and incidences, but taking those aside and by the way, those can also be healed and unlearn and relearn wanting to learn for touch to be a haven again, putting that aside, the reason why certain kinds of body with are informed by what I'm talking about can be so powerful is that they bypass the mind. They bypass conversation, they bypass logic, they bypass so much bullshit and get right into the visceral feeling of being a human and the original type of con tact, the initial type of information of communication, that broadcast safety and ease and protection to a human brain and nervous system and body. And when you take that fundamental approach and combine it with some decent bodywork skills and a polyvagal theory and stuff, you can do great things in helping to reteach a nervous system, how to do it for itself through those kinds of inputs from the bottom up. So that's, that's where the bodywork components come.

And, you know, going back to the sort of neuroplasticity approach, I mean, again, it's this this rewiring. So if you have associated certain things like touch with danger, then then that circuitry is is present, and therefore will spark this pain. In however that's expressed. What I'm really hearing you say is that there is a relearning experience, which goes from top down. So I'm coupling the discomfort around the association you have with touch as an example. And I know I'm confusing things, but but stay with me here is you're decoupling the association. But also you are re coupling or newly toppling. That's it. You're recoupling or new, the coupling. That's right, a new association within within with a new, a new circuit for you, you're practicing, you're getting muscle memory, you're getting the new neurons to fire together and like, like anything, practice then allows neurons to fire and what fires together wires together and you're actually forming a new circuitry within your body, which then decouples the chaos decouples you from the chaos that has been created from your earlier life, and actually can start to feel the reorganization of that, I guess in the relief of the symptoms that you will start to feel. That's exactly right. Mm hmm. That's so much clearer. And this is all based on. This is all based on neuroplasticity research that we that we know of. And I know that you actually have a wealth of this information on your website, which I really love. I think it really gives a lot of people confidence in what you're teaching. And for those of us who really love to get into the nitty gritty of it, I just love to read on it, but overall confidence to what is being taught. So this is based on neuroplasticity research is based on adverse childhood events research. This is based on neuro psycho neuro immunology, research. And this these are the underpinnings of the approach at CFS. Cool. I understand. Am I missing anything? Or is there no, you're

doing great. The only thing that is this is all that research is there. And then there's justice mountain of amazing empirical clinical evidence, right? Meaning just like, Guys, this shit works. It works. And, you know, if you're questing for, you know, like, what amount of information or research does one need to just try something that works? Right? You know, we still don't really know why we need to sleep. We don't guys, we don't. By the way, we also don't know why large mass of objects create gravity, we just know that they do. Okay. Long before we understood the physics of thermal combustion, we got fucking internal combustion engines to work. And no one was like, Nah, I'm not going to use one of those because I don't really understand how that hydrogen and carbon was metabolized into heat. No one would like no one's didn't use it. Almost all research and validation follows empirical success. So if you're holding out because you don't know by the here's another thing. Then there's the mountain of research for evidence that doesn't work right. By the way. Almost. There's zero correlation, and it's really effectively zero between MRI observed malformations of the spine and pain This all been refuted. Not only that all been rebutted, but that there's actual ample evidence that the downstream effects of MRI diagnosis of spinal issues creates more problems than it solves actually a lot more. It's terrible. So I don't want to be a truthiness guy, okay, like, I love research, we need it, we need a scientific standard, we can do guys, but also like, an empirically evidence based and effect. outcome based proof is to me better, or as good as, you know, understanding the absolute fundamentals of it, right. I don't think we're ever going to understand every aspect of why neurons that fire together, wire together, if they do that, and we leverage those principles to help people heal themselves.

I mean, medicine is based on being an art as much as a science and the art being the sort of the skillfulness and the interpersonal interpersonal relationships are built.

Now due to Jude real quick, I just want to take one more step because I'm on a soapbox here. Please, if you know, I can do it, if you don't, please tell your audience we're antibiotics researched for decades before they were used, or were they magically and fortuitously stumbled into by accident, and then used? Do you know this story? So right, there was a guy who was culturally culturing a mold, and it got accidentally colonized by penicillin. And then it killed a bacteria that was right next to it, someone's like, whoa, that's so interesting, that this mold just kill that bacteria. And then that person who knew a little bit about germ theory was like, Holy crap. What happens if we just tried dumping some penicillin on some dude who has an infected scratch or limb, and then you know what happened books, the penicillin killed the bacteria, and antibiotic medicine was born. That's how that happened.

I think what you're trying to say, really, is that we don't have to research everything, and maybe even understand everything down to the ground before we start applying, especially in conditions where we don't understand there are people who are suffering, and we need to help them. And there are people out there who are really invested in being able to help them. I mean, I know you've had a personal experience with CFS, so has Jen. I mean, these are like, really lived experiences that you've feel very passionate about helping people with, so that they can have hope, and indeed, results of curing something that really conventionally doesn't have a doesn't have a cure. Yeah. On conventional medicine, so we do have to look elsewhere. So I think the importance of research is really in communicating is, is in communicating, it's interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary. We can speak to each other, and we actually do have confidence. And so speaking the same language and trying to validate, as you said before, and I actually was thinking about this earlier, I was like, Oh, I wonder what research can be done moving forward with CFS school on regards to the degree of success that you have, with short term, shorter term and longer term outcomes? Like, can that be measured? Can that be captured? Because once that sort of information is captured? Yeah. And the results are validated, there's just a lot more

a real goal of ours is to try to hire a third party to do that for us. Because, as you guys, you know, even even research like that with a small scope is a big endeavor. But we'd really like to start getting more of that evidence and those results and some trends in our work, measured and scored and presented. So we're gonna get there. And it'll be exciting.

I would love to see that. And I think that there's a real scope. You have a lot of people coming through your doors, you have had a lot of success from anecdotally and I yeah, I was curious earlier today thinking about, you know, whether you did have any plans to to capture that in a more empirical way. But yeah, I completely agree. You would need a third party to do that. It's a big undertaking, and it's a beautiful thing really to get down into truth and validating what you got RT validating your own personal viewpoints. So yeah,

maybe Yeah, yeah. Gotta be careful your own bias.

Exactly, exactly. And we're all guilty of that. But yeah, what else? So this is a 12 to 12 week program, I know that you have a study yourself version of self study version. And also you have a live cohort, which is just about to go live. Am I right in saying that? So yeah,

we are we have a we are last cohort of the year, go beginning in three weeks? Hmm. Yeah, I think by the time this is published, enrollment will be closed for that. But yeah, we have the self study and the live.

Okay. And you encourage the self study program to be done over a, at least a 12 year 12 year, at least a 12 week period. Just to really pace the learning that Yeah,

you don't want to see guys, you don't want to binge learn this stuff. It's not like first of all, we don't learn Boehm styles, or at least we don't learn lastingly in a binder style. This is this is deep learning. In CFS school, we do provide, you know, almost every module has some kind of lecture that's explanatory, so that your left brain and your cognitive mind, you know, there's on board the research side, if you will. But really, the rubber hits the road with the practices. And the practices are, you cannot bypass repetition and intensity, when you want to work with the brain, the brain learns exclusively from experience. And as we talked about earlier, either repetitive experience or intense experience, I called it acute or both repetitive, acute. And these are practices that need to be done, because that's how the nervous system the organism learns and learns, relearn. And we teach in 12 weeks, we actually think that's the, that's the fastest it should be taught. And at the end of those 12 weeks, you're not you're not supposed to be a Jedi Master at regulating your nervous system. But you are supposed to have every critical component and practice for being able to do so. And one of the wonders is you know, most folks have incredible results just within our 12 week timeframe. But other people will look back to us 369 months later and just talk about, they keep getting better, which is remarkable. And they're they keep getting better without our support. This is the use of foundational, fundamental, elemental, elemental principles of brain and organism to create a different human being. And, you know, the general gist is that the first third of the probe, first quarter of the program, is more of the brain retraining I talked about a little bit earlier, using top down techniques to reassociate, beneficial non dangerous states, with yourself and with activity, then we transition into the polyvagal. And the body based components where we're helping you work with your vagus nerve, which we're not going to talk about now, except to say that it helps take you out of the danger response. And from the bottom up, and from a very autonomic nervous system level, create safety and ease, which helps tremendously. And then the next quarter is where we get into what we call the self directed trauma resolution model, where we help you work with that developmental trauma, that is usually creating a lot of your adverse responses and behavior in the presence. And those are more embodied more emotional, takes a little bit longer. But that's where our work gets really, really well laid and become sustainable. Like it's not like that's where that the real meat and potatoes is. And then the final quarter is something that we call the eMERGE component where most people come to our work to repair. But then you can use that same work to transcend and to enter a new life that wasn't divided. defined by your developmental coping patterns and illness. Now you have a life defined by expansion, openness, adventure, freedom and what you want. And so that's where that's how that program concludes itself. And the difference between the self study and the Live is that the live you have a tremendous level of support from gentleman team, and for self study years are really worse for self, people who are really good at self directed learning. It's also a much more affordable program. And then the Live is for people who want all the bells and whistles and you can learn more about the different programs on our website. And what

are the details of that website that people can really get the The

so the best way to get the lowdown on us is WWW dot chronic fatigue school.com. And then the other three really, really useful resources are my Instagram Jen Instagram and the CFS school Instagram the CFS school Instagram is just CFS school. Jen is Jennifer Jenner Jen manager? No, no, no, sorry, Jennifer J. Kami Lee, and I'm Karden Rabin. And between those four sources, the three Instagram and the website, there's a huge amount of stuff there.

And I'll put all of those details in in the show notes for anyone who's looking for those direct links. Well, thank you so much, Cardin, for being direct being frank and being very descriptive, actually in in the approach that you deliver and and why you deliver it in that way. Because I'm really hearing there's a top down bottom up approach, which is quite unique in the CFS space. And it's quite, it's holistic. It's an deep, it's a holistic work. And it's an it's deep work. And, and, yeah, thank you for bringing it to the world. I think you're helping so many people.

To thank you for that. It feels really good. It's been so nice to spend all this time with you. And you've been so patient and letting me Yap forever. And I thank you for being one of the the spreaders of the knowledge, because I like to say that there's an ocean of people that need help. And there's only like a pond or puddle of people who can really help with programs that are working, and we need your help. And everyone's help to cross that chasm between the people who need help and the people who can help. So thank you for what you do.

Yeah, yeah, and I couldn't agree more. I think that that chasm, we need more people who know about the help that they can sign people signpost people to when they are in distress, because there's often very few options available to them. And when they uncover some options, it's very difficult to know what each one is involved.

It's really overwhelming. It's overwhelming.

And that's certainly not helpful in the states that they're in. So thank you very much for your time and for your explaining your approach. And for anyone listening and if it resonates with them to follow the links in the show notes. So thank you so much, Cardin.

Thank you, Jude.