068 – Dr. Don St. John: Healing Trauma & Embracing Oneness

Sarah Tacy [00:00:06]:
Hello. Welcome. I’m Sara Tacy, and this is Threshold Moments, a podcast where guests and I share stories about the process of updating into truer versions of ourselves. The path is unknown, and the pull feels real. Together, we share our grief, laughter, love, and life saving tools. Join us.

Hello, welcome to Threshold Moments. When I went to record this intro, I often label them before I begin.

Sarah Tacy [00:00:49]:
And I will just label that it’s an intro. And what was interesting is that I wrote Dr. Don St. John inspiration, and then I had to delete, delete, delete intro. And I think that having the word inspiration subconsciously came up How I feel after speaking to Dr. Don St. John and after having read the majority of his book. And I say the majority not because the whole book isn’t worth reading, but I have a number of books to read for the podcast guests and life and kids that get sick.

Sarah Tacy [00:01:28]:
And so, I got to read almost the whole thing and I can go back and finish. I am just so inspired. And if any of you listening have had parts of your childhood that were hard, Maybe you had chronic stress. Maybe you had acute trauma as acute means, like, they happened in the moment and they could be a really big deal. And some are chronic so that you might not even notice them and some are chronic and really obvious. They affect us in pretty big ways as to our patterning and how we see our lives and how we perceive what is possible and not possible and how we judge people. And if you think of judgment as a microaggression, a micro fight, all of this largely comes from the subconscious.

Sarah Tacy [00:02:19]:
Dr. Don St. John came from a conception that was in the way that his mother was not excited for the pregnancy and a pregnancy that most likely had stress and a birth that was a near death, and early, early on beginning verbal and physical abuse through his childhood and seeing those patterns really play out through his adolescence and through his early twenties. And now, he is an 81 year old man. We would like to say he is now living his 82nd year of life and sees life being more full of opportunity and love and richness and expansion. And I think his book is worth reading for the insights of the multidimensional perspective of including the body in your healing. This session in particular, we got to hear a story that wasn’t in the book around the spiritual awakening that he had in his early thirties. And one part that I didn’t get to bring up that I wanted to bring up was his chapter on the heart. And I just wanna give this image.

Sarah Tacy [00:03:40]:
He spoke about the nervous system in-depth and in length, and I think we can all have an understanding or an image of how we have a brain and we have a brainstem and how we have our somatic nervous system, all these nerves that reach out to our limbs and that we have nerves that go into our organs and how they fill all parts of our body. He later talks about fascia in a similar way, which I’m also it’s so near and dear to my heart. But what I had never really thought about is how the heart also has these tentacles. Like I think of the heart as a standalone Oregon, but to think of the heart as also having all of these tentacles, your veins in your arteries that reach to every part of your body and that there’s intelligence, which he goes into in the book in the fluids of our body. And that there’s these electromagnetic fields that emit from our heart that are picked up by other people’s hearts and brains that can be measured. And we start to see that the heart has memory and it’s as much as And we start to see that the heart has memory and it’s as much of a brain as our brain itself. I just want to put that out there because if we didn’t get to it in this talk, there are many, many things that, you know, we could only touch upon a few. And I think it was rich.

Sarah Tacy [00:05:03]:
I think it was beautiful. I think the cadence speaks to his nervous system. And I think in listening to it, it could also be settling perhaps to you as well. So without further ado, it is my great honor to present this podcast to you. Hello, and welcome to Threshold Moments. My name is Sarah Tacy. And today we have with us Doctor. Don St.

Sarah Tacy [00:05:38]:
John. Doctor. Don St. John is a somatic relational psychotherapist. He helps those who intuitively know that to face past traumas and current life challenges, their bodies must be included. Relationships must be included. Culture must be included. Doctor.

Sarah Tacy [00:06:01]:
St. John began his clinical training in 1967 and has been working since as a psychotherapist, relationship therapist, and somatic therapist. His interest over the past few years has been helping people realize how many more resources they have available within themselves, to learn to connect to those resources and strengths, plus learn to connect well with those they love. Doctor. St. John is the author of Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture. In the show notes, I will have a clip of all of people he has studied with, the many things he’s done. It’s an extensive list that I enjoyed reading over, and so we will also have that in the show notes.

Sarah Tacy [00:06:54]:
Welcome.

Dr. Don St. John [00:06:56]:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Sarah Tacy [00:07:02]:
Yeah. Me as well. That last line where it says that your interest over the past few years have been helping people realize how many resources they have Reminds me of a definition of stress that I borrow from Jerry Molitor who synthesized it to Sarah, and this is not, like, what is stress in your body, but an equation, stress is when we have more demands than resources.

Dr. Don St. John [00:07:35]:
Beautiful.

Sarah Tacy [00:07:36]:
Yeah. So simple. Right?

Dr. Don St. John [00:07:38]:
Yes. Very.

Sarah Tacy [00:07:40]:
And that led me to putting out something called 21 days of untapped support, which was all about noticing the resources that we have all around us at all times that often go unseen or unfelt so that we might pause, pause being a resource, pause to notice one of those resources to begin to change that equation so that even when the demands are building, we also have access to building our resources. I’m wondering for you what resource building looks like for you and then also perhaps with your clients.

Dr. Don St. John [00:08:21]:
There are a couple of ways that I look at that. 1 is building connections with other people, starting at home, starting with my wife. And I think one of my most potent resources is our relationship, because we’ve evolved it to the point where we can share pretty much anything and everything with each other. And sometimes that takes courage. Sometimes that is very vulnerable to do, you know, in both directions, her to me, me to her. But with that, it it’s a fortification. You know? It’s it really ups my ability to handle the demands of life. And, of course, also with friends, you know, to have a community of people that I can call, that cheer me up, that and tell me a joke to, you know, to have a network of support in addition to that close family support.

Dr. Don St. John [00:09:41]:
You know, our daughter now is is in her fifties, and we have grandkids and that’s a source of support. So that’s that’s outside of myself. Then there’s my abilities to get quiet inside. And that’s a big one because, you know, we live in a world of a great deal of noise. I believe you live in Maine. So if that’s so, it’s it’s not, you know, the same as living in a big city. We’re in Salt Lake City, which I’d say is in between a town in Maine and Manhattan, New York. You know, it’s a big city, but it’s a little quieter.

Dr. Don St. John [00:10:31]:
But the ability to get quiet on the inside, to, as you said, Sarah, to pause, But to have that pause be meaningful, to be able in a short period of time to bring the decibel the internal decibel level way down. It’s refreshing, renewing, restorative. And here are a couple of facts about the body that once this is recognized at an experiential level, it’s a game changer. And that is the body is primarily water, like 70% more or less. There’s a discipline that I’ve been practicing for 30 years. Before I go there, my background, my childhood was extremely traumatic. I mean, starting at birth, they almost died at birth. My mother is a very complex woman who loved me intensely, but would lose her impulse control.

Dr. Don St. John [00:11:54]:
She had no impulse control, and it manifested as her swinging, you know, with an open hand, a shoe, a wooden stirring spoon. And it would be an almost daily occurrence, you know, starting when I was an infant and continuing until I was big enough to say no and keep it from happening. And so my body was a wreck in terms of my connection to it, in terms of serious chronic tension that fragmented my sense of self. So to learn that the body is mostly fluid and there’s a discipline that practice can help you restore the integrity, the resilience, the receptivity, you know, all those good important qualities to have as an adult. Yeah. That’s

Sarah Tacy [00:13:08]:
I have. Yeah. I’m like, oh, 2 points because you made 2 points. 1 has to do with relational aspect and the reason why the listeners couldn’t see this, but I saw that you saw this on my Tacy, that when you mentioned that one of your resources was your relationship with your wife. I spent so many years teaching yoga, practicing yoga. I didn’t see a therapist. I thought of myself as relatively healthy with a pretty happy childhood. And there was just a sense of, like, independence from a young age.

Sarah Tacy [00:13:45]:
The more independence I could be, the better. The more I could, like, override pain, the better you know, especially as an athlete, the more you could push through, the better. And so I developed all of these self help tools. And as I’ve gotten more into the somatic practices resolution practices, I remember asking one of the teacher’s assistants once when I was first studying like, well, okay, this is great, but like, how can I do this on my own? She’s like, well, actually, part of this is learning to be relational. And what I might add to that is that my understanding of trauma physiology is that even if we’re around others when it happens, and often we are, we feel isolated and helpless and hopeless. And so having a core person in your life where you couldn’t express yourself and you couldn’t be yourself. And that to then come around to another place in your life where even when it’s vulnerable, you make it through to the other side and you make it through stronger and that you have friendships that that can happen too. It is a resource I’m still leaning into or I’m like, okay, I can go to nature as a resource.

Sarah Tacy [00:14:58]:
I can go to my breath as a resource. I could meditate. But I’m practicing more and more to reach out to a friend. Or Jerry Molitor, who I mentioned is somebody that my husband and I see every Friday, and he’s always, please reach out because what I’m what you’re practicing is learning how to coregulate. And he said his his goal is largely silent because people are so in the pattern of figuring it out themselves. And so, as you Sarah, that it just feels like something I want to highlight also because it’s a newer part of my own development. Even though I’ve always had friends and loving family members, I like to process the hard stuff on my own. And although I might be able to say I’m sad to somebody to have anger or to have other feelings that might get projected onto somebody else or might involve somebody else’s feelings is a very interesting new threshold for me.

Sarah Tacy [00:16:03]:
And I feel silly saying it’s new at 40. But Yeah. Yeah. It’s a big one. And it’s something I would have told you 10 years ago. Like, oh, I’ve got this. I communicate clearly. And just realizing the areas that are I’m excited to continue to open up into, because it’s so powerful to really be able to turn to someone and trust that your vulnerability can be held and trust that if something you’re saying that could be hard for them to receive is something that we might both get through is a beautiful new thing.

Dr. Don St. John [00:16:40]:
I think between us, we cover close to a 100% of the population in that my childhood was highly traumatic. And your childhood was, sounds like, from what you’re saying, normal and positive. And, you know, it shows. You can I can look at your face, and I can see you had a pretty good childhood? And, yeah, we both have challenges. We both have had issues that we’ve had to deal with and work through and pay attention to and learn to open and be closer to another human being while at the same time maintaining a sense of independence, a sense of freedom. For me, the ideal, and I talk about it in my book because a scientist by the name of Mei Wan Ho said water is coherent. And she defined it as a state in which both individual freedom, autonomy, and global cohesion, togetherness, closeness are both maximized. Now that sounds like a contradiction.

Dr. Don St. John [00:18:10]:
How can you be really free and really together? That’s the ideal. That’s the direction of evolution in relationships. To really be close and to really feel free, it’s always in flux. It’s moving one direction or another, and, you know, adjustments are made usually unconsciously. But if the relationship is to thrive and feel deeply satisfying over time, it has to grow to contain both of those dynamics.

Sarah Tacy [00:18:59]:
Ta da, an episode last season, last summer on interdependence and my own curiosity around a word that had been really hot in the sphere of sovereignty and noticing in my own relationship as I kept tuning into what is true for me that sometimes it felt like building a brick wall before a bridge. And, and on a cellular level, I imagine, like, the receptor sites in the cells and the ligands, like when one decides I’m gonna dance a slightly different way and change the pattern of how we’ve been doing the tango, that it might not be met right away. And there might be a feeling of abandonment and being able to hang out in that space until the possibility of new pattern arises. And I feel like I’ve gotten to see it in my own relationship when we both get more and more honest with what is true for us and still caring for the dynamic of a family. And I’ve gotten to see it in others Yeah. The path of consciousness, for me.

Dr. Don St. John [00:20:17]:
Yeah. The path of consciousness I say this facetiously, but there’s some truth in it. It isn’t for sissies. It takes courage. It takes commitment. It takes feeling awkward, feeling at times helpless or lost or defeated and continuing to get up and put one foot in front of the other and moving forward and learning and growing, it takes a great deal of patience. Yeah. Patience is one of those qualities without which it really is difficult because the potential for so many frustrating moments, you know, and especially when you’re first starting out and there’s so much to learn.

Dr. Don St. John [00:21:12]:
There’s so much I’ve been at this, Sarah, literally. My first psychotherapist was 60 years ago. 60. And I got a long way to go in my estimation.

Sarah Tacy [00:21:30]:
I have a lot of questions about your time line. Maybe this is the patient’s thing. There’s a part of me that’s like, I don’t know if we’ll be able to fit it all in.

Dr. Don St. John [00:21:38]:
We won’t.

Sarah Tacy [00:21:39]:
Okay. Great. I’m gonna say out loud just so that it’s it’s in the ethos, but I really have a question about your thirties. But what I’ll ask before that and you briefly mentioned that you had a traumatic birth and trauma in your early years. And in your book a few times, you mentioned the importance of prenatal and birth in the patterning and sequencing in a person’s body and unconscious living. I think that’s kind of how I understood it. And I think a lot of people who are listening can really understand how early childhood patterns create and live into adulthood when kept unconscious.

Dr. Don St. John [00:22:23]:
Exactly. Beautifully said.

Sarah Tacy [00:22:26]:
But I’m wondering if you could go a little bit more into detail on what it looks like prenatal and birth. Like, how those two things and I know there’s a whole gosh. His name is flipping my Ray Castellino is one of them. There’s a whole field of pre and perinatal psychosomatic workers who really understand this portion of a timeline and the depth of nonverbal patterning that can occur and how then those things seem like that just must be how life is. Could you, from your perspective, share with me your thoughts on this period of life?

Dr. Don St. John [00:23:06]:
Well, I I think, especially birth and also the months in utero, set a template of expectations. It’s, you know, how it feels. If it feels, you know, somatically uncomfortable, and if birth I mean, there are those who believe that birth in and of itself under any circumstance is a trauma that humanity faces because it’s a rapid separation. You know, for 9 months, everything we need is provided and we’re in this generally safe and pleasant environment. And then all of a sudden, we have to breathe for ourselves. All of a sudden, there’s this separation, and it depends on the quality, the mother’s capacity to provide a deep connection with her newborn. But if the circumstances going forward are mostly positive, the effects of that birth, no matter how it was, will be vastly different than if the circumstances going forward are difficult or negative or painful or distressful. Okay? Vastly different.

Dr. Don St. John [00:24:47]:
So, yes, it’s important. Yes. It does set a template of expectations, but those next few years will make a huge difference in how that plays out. So that’s that’s my take on it. And, you know, again, we’re becoming more conscious of, for example, the effects of alcohol on fetal development. My back in my day, nobody knew that that would be harmful if mother had 2 or 3 drinks every day during pregnancy. You know? Of course, now we know. The same with cigarette smoke.

Dr. Don St. John [00:25:37]:
It’s gonna have an effect on that developing fetus. We didn’t know it back then. So we’re becoming more and more conscious of the importance of the environment that mother is in and the support that she feels from her husband, from her family. You know, I I had a client once who whose mother was 16 when she gave birth to my client and had to quit school because abortion wasn’t an option. Giving the baby up for adoption wasn’t an option. So she kept the baby, but she resented the fact that she was born. And, you know, from day 1 and for the next 70 years, they battled each other. Baby felt mother’s resentment and resented her back.

Dr. Don St. John [00:26:43]:
Mother felt baby’s resentment, and the cycle began within the 1st few days. And Sarah literally lasted for decades. Decades until, you know, my client began to realize that she had a role in the quality of that relationship. She wasn’t merely the victim.

Sarah Tacy [00:27:13]:
Right. And so that is a big part in your book too of being the author of your life so that even when terrible things happen and I think, actually, before I say that, I wanna rewind just a little bit about the support to the mother. And I might even say, like, the support to the primary caregiver by whomever is, you know, partnering them and or whatever their community looks like. I read a book called Nurturing Resilience, and there were so many parts in there about the responsibility of the mother and all the things that could go wrong or right with the child mostly wrong in that book. And I think I was as I was reading it, I was like, well, what about the support to the primary caregiver? There was a quote that I once heard was something like, if we want people to do well, we would tend to the earth. And if we want babies to do well, we would tend to the mother. And even thinking about that example that you gave of the 16 year old who had that child, my guess is that that mother was very under resourced. And in the way of Ray Castellino, he would have that 2 layers of support.

Sarah Tacy [00:28:35]:
So if the primary caregiver has 2 layers of support and say it’s a heterosexual relationship and it’s in the birthing room and you have the mother who has the doctor or the doula, and the doula has 2 layers of support, and then the partner has 2 layers of support, and then each one of those people have 2 layers of support, just how different it would feel to the baby. And that just feels so big to me because so much of what I see in our society right now is how isolated we all are. Like, the boxes that we live in metaphorically, but also within our homes and our separate cars and how lonely that can be. And, yeah, I’m just, oh, thinking about earlier in the timeline, much earlier earlier when we were in villages that were closer and cousins played together, and then there were grandparents around and aunts and uncles. Yeah. So there’s that part. That if I could have a wish for the world would be that there’d be so much more support for the caregivers and in our systems. When you said that those earliest parts are a template of how life feels

Dr. Don St. John [00:29:55]:
Mhmm.

Sarah Tacy [00:29:56]:
It was the simplest wording I’ve heard, and you can tell that I love when someone can put something complex into something simple.

Dr. Don St. John [00:30:02]:
Template of expectations. Yes.

Sarah Tacy [00:30:07]:
A felt template of expectations.

Dr. Don St. John [00:30:10]:
Oh, for sure.

Sarah Tacy [00:30:11]:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes it so understandable and digestible for me. So thank you for that. So in your book a few times, you mentioned, and I didn’t get to the very end in all transparency, but I most of it. And a few times throughout the book, you mentioned this threshold when you were 30 or in your thirties. And in one other portion of the book, you mentioned your 20th year in the Air Force. Force, and I don’t know if those line up.

Sarah Tacy [00:30:42]:
That would almost make me think that was your forties. But you often spoke about in your thirties, things began to change. And I’m wondering if there was any specific threshold that brought you from your current state? And maybe you could describe to us what your current state was in your twenties to this transition that you were mentioning in your thirties.

Dr. Don St. John [00:31:08]:
Oh, let me clarify one thing. I wasn’t in the air force 20 years. I was 20 years old.

Sarah Tacy [00:31:16]:
Got it.

Dr. Don St. John [00:31:17]:
When I first went to a psychotherapist, 20 or 21. And, you know, in my early twenties, even after I had started psychotherapy, I was acting out pretty badly. You know, I was drinking a lot, getting into fights, a relationship in high school that continued for the 1st year that I was in the service ended, and I took it very badly. I was a wreck. Then I settled down a little bit in my mid twenties and got married, but I was still acting out. I was still drinking, having affairs everywhere. I mean, it was it was just a very, very, very unconscious time in my life. And, you know, in my late twenties, maybe early thirties, I started realizing the body needed to be addressed for healing.

Dr. Don St. John [00:32:23]:
And I had an experience somewhere. Let’s see. 76 would have been 33. Yeah. I I was married for the Sarah time, and I took a 10 day conference workshop that residential focused on living from love. The the teacher was kind of a mystic. He was also a medical doctor, but he got ill. Western medicine could not address it.

Dr. Don St. John [00:33:01]:
He went on a spiritual quest. I’m making a long story very, very brief here. He came back, and he began teaching, and he’s teaching about living from the heart, opening the heart and living from there. And it was the 2nd day of the conference, and I got a call from my wife. Sarah she needed to talk to me. She came up. It was a 2 and a half hour drive. She came up and said she wanted to have an open relationship, and, by the way, she had begun.

Dr. Don St. John [00:33:36]:
And I, you know, I said, do you have anything else to say? She said no. I said goodbye. And she left, and I began bouncing off the walls. It was some of the most painful moments that I’d ever experienced consciously. And that night, the group was very empathic and supportive and comforting. The next morning, the teacher came in like a Zen master and Sarah, okay, to the whole group, but it sure sounded like he was talking to me. He said it’s time that we let go of the emotional level and move to the heart. If you don’t wanna do it, I’ll give you your money back.

Dr. Don St. John [00:34:24]:
And, you know, I was bouncing even farther off the walls. How could I possibly how could I leave the emotional level at a moment like that? He said, let us know. Let me know by the evening. And, you know, I spent the afternoon in rage and pain. It was just phenomenal. When all of a sudden, Sarah, and I I mean this, it was all of a sudden, my heart seemed to burst open, and all I felt was love for no one in particular. Just love. And I was like, what in the is this? You know? I had no reference, no context in which to hold it.

Dr. Don St. John [00:35:22]:
And the the the sadness, the pain, the anger would come up, but it would just come and go. And that love would be there. And so I said, yeah. I can stay. I can stay. You know? And I did, and strange things, I had an experience of literally leaving my body and looking down at it from the ceiling and all kinds of strange things like that. But I knew my life had turned in a positive direction, and it did. It did.

Dr. Don St. John [00:36:09]:
It took time. There were things, you know, married and divorced again, and but I’ve been with the same woman now for 40 years, and it gets better and better and better. So that was one of those moments, one of those thresholds.

Sarah Tacy [00:36:30]:
Yeah. It’s inspiring to me the number of lifetimes that we can live within one life. As I say that I see my cat behind me and I’m thinking of the 9 lives and wondering, you know, the grace that we might have to have multiple versions of ourselves to keep awakening and forgetting and awakening and forgetting. And

Dr. Don St. John [00:36:54]:
You summarized it amazingly

Sarah Tacy [00:37:01]:
Would you be able to say a thing or two about integrating from an experience like that?

Dr. Don St. John [00:37:10]:
I’m not sure I can because, you know, in in that particular situation, it it just seemed to happen. I turned in a spiritual direction. The woman I was married to, by the end of that conference, you know, she was at home and I was away at the conference. But by the time I came home, we felt very close, and we each knew that it was time to go our separate ways. Some months later, I received a set of books from her called The Course in Miracles. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. Your smile suggests you are.

Sarah Tacy [00:37:55]:
Yeah.

Dr. Don St. John [00:37:56]:
I studied it for 3 years, and then I went on to study someone else and so forth. And it just continued because all of a sudden, spirituality meant a lot to me. Up until that conference, it hadn’t. I was a recovering Catholic. I pretty much dismissed, you know, the teachings of that church, and spirituality became real, and I became interested in finding what was gonna work for me.

Sarah Tacy [00:38:33]:
It became real through FeltSense?

Dr. Don St. John [00:38:36]:
Through my heart opening and then having these experiences that were hard to explain.

Sarah Tacy [00:38:46]:
At the beginning of the book, you say something about the healing journey is the surest way to a rewarding, adventurous, meaningful, and vibrant life. And I don’t know if I can find the quote here, but I think you are essentially demonstrating through your stories, the way life can be one way and how our belief systems, you mentioned 2 dysfunctional beliefs, which one is to behave, to belong, which I think kind of fits into the recovering Catholicism. And then the there’s no hope that one could come from either of those schools or both those feelings of life having no hope or having to confine yourself and act one way for the purpose of belonging to opening up to more radical honesty and living from the heart. And you use the word enchanting at some part of your book that life often feels enchanting to you. I think you use that word. And for me, that’s just really hopeful. And I’m so grateful that you can demonstrate this. And you just shared with me this is your 81st year.

Sarah Tacy [00:40:05]:
We decided that, well, actually, you’re Eighty second. Completed 81 years. You’re in your 82nd year. I remember looking at, Wayne Dyer when he was in his seventies and thinking, gosh, there’s something about him. I thought that he dressed somewhat youthful, but it didn’t look like he was faking it. It belonged to him. And I was thinking that what that was was to age with curiosity is such a beautiful thing because I think sometimes as we get older, it’s inevitable that we’re gonna have heartbreak. It’s inevitable that people we love are gonna die.

Sarah Tacy [00:40:40]:
It’s inevitable that disease is gonna hit or that we’re gonna be aware of wars or see them and that we either harden and protect or we soften and grow. And the courage and I’m not there to put down the hardening and the protective nature that sometimes helps people survive. But I am inspired by the ability for 1 to soften and grow and open and hold the both and and lead with curiosity. So thank you for being an example of that possibility.

Dr. Don St. John [00:41:16]:
Your words are very kind.

Sarah Tacy [00:41:19]:
They’re from the heart. Mhmm.

Dr. Don St. John [00:41:22]:
I can tell.

Sarah Tacy [00:41:23]:
There was a part in your book that I was interested in, and it I mean, many parts I was interested in, but this part was around the wildness within us. And you say something about us being the most trying to think of the word, but it was, like, the most capable of of killing and hurting and harming. And our ability to be with our wildness, which would hold both that capacity and our anger and our rage and our ability to protect ourselves and our ability to stand up for what we believe and our tenderness. Can you talk to us about the wild parts?

Dr. Don St. John [00:42:02]:
Let me tell you a little story about a lion, a baby lion that got separated from his pride of lions and got lost and was picked up by a herd of goats. And this baby lion was raised by the goats and. Bleeded like a goat, walked like a goat, thought he was a goat. Until one day, this big male lion comes along and sees what’s going on and grabs that young, now adolescent lion by the scruff of the neck and takes him to the river and shows him his reflection, and he realizes he’s a lion. I think that happens to most individuals. We’re taught to be good, and parents want us to be good little boys and girls, understandably. And there’s a tension between authentic expression and parental approval, And that tension is with us throughout life. You know? That parental approval becomes our mates, our bosses, our culture.

Dr. Don St. John [00:43:26]:
There’s this tension between genuine feelings and our expectations of approval with disapproval. Right? And the wildness, the the strength, the power, that capacity to roar, if necessary, get stuffed out, get suppressed, gets repressed, gets constricted. In a workshop recently, I had people roar. You know? Let it out from deep. And you will be surprised, Sarah, at how challenging that was for so many people.

Sarah Tacy [00:44:15]:
I was just at a circle with Sarah Jenks, and I don’t think she promoted as, like, female rage, but she had her drum. And she and, you know, there’s a big bonfire, and she’s walking around just taunting people about the, you know, the people pleaser and the and just getting people to, like, release it. And at some point, like, people were, like, on all fours around the fire, like, just, like, roaring into the fire. And it was amazing to me. And maybe we could this could be a segue even into somatics. It was amazing to me that when I had a space for that to come out, because I would say like my line of learning was to understand from everybody’s perspective within the four agreements of, like, nothing is personal, but that didn’t leave a lot of room for the feelings that were also in there because I could conceptually understand how nothing is personal. I could conceptually understand people’s lives down to their childhood and their birth and why they might act how they act and and my role in it, but it didn’t leave room sometimes for the actual feelings that were in there. I was, oh, could my feelings just get out of the way because I understand the bigger picture? And I was amazed that just by roaring and getting into that space, these awarenesses of where I had rage, that my love was so much, like, greater that I don’t know if this is sufficient, but this is the story I tell myself, that my love is so much greater that it kinda just stifled those feelings down in a way.

Sarah Tacy [00:45:54]:
But I love this person so much, and, therefore, I understand and it’s not personal. And to have an outlet just for that released something in me. And I’m still in the curiosity along the lines of saying relational healing and conversations also around anger and release in ways that aren’t harmful to others, but that allow me and my body to unstack things that have been suppressed for the purpose of peace and belonging and caretaking. I’m not surprised how hard it is. And, also, I’m aware of how powerful it is when there is safe space to have those sounds emit from our bodies.

Dr. Don St. John [00:46:46]:
You know, it’s reclaiming the choice, reclaiming the options because to suppress, that’s a force. Right? That that rage, that roar is a force, and the way we suppress it is by cutting ourselves off from the tissues involved in the expression. So we reduce the space in our bodies in one way or another. It becomes more dense in places, more constricted in places. And now we don’t have to think about suppressing. Okay. It’s now automatic. Right? So it isn’t that it’s important to go around raging at all your friends, but it’s important to have the physiological capacity to do that because when that’s suppressed, there’s a diminishing of our sense of self.

Dr. Don St. John [00:47:58]:
We feel a little less than. How we can feel. If we had that freedom. Some communication within our system is diminished. So there’s there’s a cost to that suppression.

Sarah Tacy [00:48:25]:
As you were saying that I had this recollection that in my twenties, I used to have dreams where there is some sort of violent action that was about to happen or some sort of life or death scenario. And it was that silent Sarah. That like needing to scream, but not being able to scream and not being able to, like, elicit the help or awareness that I would need. And in this moment, as you speak about, you know, not I didn’t necessarily have that outlet. I didn’t use that outlet, I should say, growing up. I just never used that outlet. When you talked about how I’m cutting off or how one could be cutting off those musculature and those spaces in our body that would have the knowing of how to do that. Yeah.

Sarah Tacy [00:49:18]:
It awakened that dream for me a little bit. The spaciousness and choice, as you said, the choice. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna go around and rage at everybody, but to have a place to be able to even know what that feels like was pretty empowering. It was interesting. It was awakening something. And I recently heard Boyd Varty speaking about when we tap into the wild parts of us, how often so much life energy resurfaces. You mentioned this in your book. It was one of the last chapters that I read was about and and it’s not new to me.

Sarah Tacy [00:49:55]:
I’ve been very into emotional anatomy for a very long time. And I’ve more recently just been looking at different people around me and seeing how tight everything is, how contained everything is. Sometimes, I feel like in particular in women and how there are other women who you can see there’s much more flow in their body and in their senses. And this brought you know, again, for me, if you could say a little bit about how the body reacts to stress and how it might show up visually or in a felt sense.

Dr. Don St. John [00:50:40]:
One of my most important teachers, a woman named Emily Conrad, would say that stress was on a continuum with paralysis. You know, paralysis, in other words, is an extreme level of stress. Stress is a much lower level of paralysis. Meaning, it it cuts down movement. It curtails. It diminishes our capacity to move. The same woman talked about primordial anatomy and cosmic anatomy. And I’m gonna attempt to explain them a little bit and took me a while to really understand them.

Dr. Don St. John [00:51:41]:
So I’m gonna do my best to make it as clear as possible. Primordial anatomy means moving from a consciousness of the fluids level of the body. Okay. So for example, if you’re moving your shoulder back and forth like this, and this isn’t regular, normal anatomy, you can can explain the movements in terms of kinesiology, the retraction, protraction of the scapula, etcetera, etcetera. But if I could drop my consciousness deep enough with practice and sense that I’m moving at another level, in a level of of fluids, it can morph into a sense that I am something other than a biped. For example, if I’m doing this, I can begin to get a sense that I’m some, I don’t know, bird like creature. Okay? So it’s a shift and expansion of my sense of identity as this biped walking down the street. You know? I’m on the ground now, and and my elbows are up, and it’s all so smooth.

Dr. Don St. John [00:53:09]:
It’s delicious. It feels so good. And then if I go deeper, and now we’re talking about years of practice. Just if I go deeper, I can sense, you know, the atom, you know, one of the building blocks of our physical body. It’s mostly space. Okay? You take an atom, and it’s, like, 99% space. And if I can sense into that, my sense of a separate body k, begins to dissolve, and I can sense myself as kind of part of the cosmos. And, you know, if you look at the descriptions that spiritual teachers give, called by different words, enlightenment experiences, this sense of oneness with everything.

Dr. Don St. John [00:54:17]:
The sense that there’s no real breakdown between you and me, that we’re really at some level, you know, nodal points of this sphere of consciousness.

Sarah Tacy [00:54:35]:
As I hear this, I am like, oh, I I understand because I feel like I’ve had a lived experience of both of those. So what you’re saying is not confusing to me and makes plenty of sense. And I’m thinking for the listeners too, where the question started off with, like, what does the body look like with stress? And it Well, no. This is this is great. I’m thinking about a nervous system map where it’s the range of resonance or the range of regulation and that the smaller our tolerance, the smaller our capacity, the less access we have to feeling that sense of oneness, to feeling more space and air between everything and connection to everything, and the tighter our bodies get into a solid matter. And that the bigger our range of resonance range of regulation gets, I can almost imagine that, like, expanding it to that there’s more space and so much more space that you can start to feel the fluid. And then as the tissues come apart even more and you start to be able to tap into the atomic level that you notice the space in between and the air and how there’s more air than anything. And psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, what this feels like is most likely that moment you had when your heart burst open and there was just love that was digesting all the other feelings that were coming up.

Sarah Tacy [00:56:01]:
And to me, this is just, like, a really big range of resonance. And I will also say that I did a practice where I think it was maybe the practice was called resonance, and you’re with a partner and you take 3 minute intervals of noticing surface touch. So, like, my legs on the chair and my feet on the ground. And each round you speak more slowly and more slowly, which means I have to change from the level of my brain to the speed of my body and then slow it down even more to what one sensational pick up on. And the first time through, I lost the focus that the focus was supposed to be surface. And I was like, in 3 minutes, I was like it just felt like I was one with the universe. It was like, all I could feel was the air in between and this one, and I just, like, almost couldn’t feel the back body being different than the chair. I could notice them both.

Sarah Tacy [00:57:07]:
But there have been other experiences of that, but it was interesting. And in that class, sometimes, we’ll do, like, inherent movement of the hand, which is, like my teacher will call it the the inner sea creature, so the more fluid body and the inherent movements that happen. So everything you said lands for me. And if it’s helpful for the listener too, just thinking about those times where you have very little capacity and your body feels tight to times when perhaps you’re in nature or you’re with in a really safe, loving situation where your capacity feels so big and worries drop and you feel more aligned and supported with the universe and nature?

Dr. Don St. John [00:57:48]:
Sarah, I have spoken on probably 40 or more podcasts over the last year and a half, and I have never attempted to explain primordial anatomy and cosmic anatomy. And I don’t think it was a coincidence that I chose to do that with you because, you know, your consciousness is very, very clear. It’s really extraordinary. So and given what some of your clients have said about you on your website, I I get it.

Sarah Tacy [00:58:32]:
We did our research on each other. You start the book saying, this book is dedicated to all of you who intuitively know that being normal is so far from who you can truly be. And at one other point, you say, proving a view of what else life has to offer is the purpose of this book. And I don’t know if you have anything else to say about the myth of normal, or if that is just a beautiful place to land that we’re here to be so much more than normal?

Dr. Don St. John [00:59:12]:
You know, compared to when I began my adulthood, There’s so so many more resources available to support all of us. I’m embarking on this healing adventure. And for me, I believe I’ve come to believe that that’s why we’re on this Sarah is to engage that journey. And it is an adventure because, you know, if you go backpacking for 3 days, you’re going to encounter unexpected challenges, and you’re gonna encounter some of the most beautiful vistas. You’re going to discover new aspects of yourself, new capacities. There’s so much that you discover on an adventure that’s real. And this is the most real and the most beautiful because you realize you are so much more than you thought you were. You have so much more to give to life than you ever thought.

Dr. Don St. John [01:00:41]:
And and so, yeah, take the risks. It’s risky. It’s risky. You know?

Sarah Tacy [01:00:52]:
Beautiful. Thank you. Take the risks. You have so much more than you thought to offer, offer and the world has so much more to offer you as well. This is Doctor. Don St. John. And again, his latest book, Healing the Wounds of Childhood and Culture.

Sarah Tacy [01:01:09]:
Thank you so much.

Dr. Don St. John [01:01:11]:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. It was delightful.

Sarah Tacy [01:01:28]:
Quick addendum here for those of you that have interest in the heart, I followed up with Dr. Don St John and he said yes to doing a follow-up interview so that we can look at the threshold, his biggest threshold which we talked about in this interview when he’s 30 and he has this spiritual awakening through his heart later when he’s 56 he has another huge huge threshold, which is also through his heart, but through a medical emergency. So we wanted to talk, I wanted to talk more about this wise octopus-like heart that has tentacles running through our bodies. And he said, yes, so we’ll see what else comes up. And I also wanted to touch more into what it looks like to be married for 40 years in a relationship that has open communication and honesty at the center. So if you want to hear more, please follow the show. You can do that by going to the show page and then just hitting the plus button at the top. Thank you.

Sarah Tacy [01:01:52]:
Thank you for tuning in. It’s been such a pleasure. If you’re looking for added support, I’m offering a program that’s totally free called 21 days of untapped support. It’s pretty awesome. It’s very easy. It’s very helpful. You can find it at Sarah. And if you love this episode, please subscribe and like.

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