- Understand how unresolved trauma and chronic stress can keep your physiology locked in fight, flight, or freeze, affecting pain, energy, digestion, immunity, and the body’s ability to heal.
- Discover how noticing emotions as physical sensations, allowing them to be present, and shifting attention between discomfort and safety can help build nervous system regulation.
- Learn how practices such as TRE, EFT tapping, binaural beats, and gentle energy exercises may gradually release stored tension without overwhelming your system.
Full Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background 0:00
When stuff happens to us that at the time feels stressful, terrifying, overwhelming, you know, a lot of times will freeze. And one of the things that happens is that the muscles and the fascia in our body lock up and get tense and tight to literally hold those emotions in the body. So they're not coming up to conscious awareness to bother us. Actually, these areas of tight constricted myofascia, Wilhelm Reich, it used to call it reichian armoring. I personally think that's the biggest source of blocked energy in begin with.
This is Doctor Talks. My next guest is somebody that I've been excited to interview. And it took a couple, actually a few years, I think, when I first contacted you and you were coming out of being a doctor treating COVID patients and weren't really in the right space to do this interview at that time. Thank goodness we've got you here. Our guest Dr. Eric Robbins, he's an MD. at a major medical center and he's a urologist by training. He went to Baylor medical college, university of Texas undergrad.
Those two are rivals. I think are they playing today or something like that? I. Yeah. But so from Texas is, is background in college and then medical school. And the way I first heard about Eric, and we were talking about this earlier was back in 2015, I had chronic fatigue. how to do was something called pranic healing. And Eric was somebody that came up in conversations around that because he was an MD who had learned pronic healing and he's so many more other energy healing techniques, but he'd co-written a book with the founder of prantic healing, and I just thought that was so cool.
Just in our conversations here, he is actually in this major medical center doing energy, healing as well as the standard of care for the types of things he's treating. But I think that's just so amazing that he is combining the two. So Eric, it's so good to have you here. Thanks for being on with us. Tom, thank you so much for having me. Yeah. As you said, It's been a couple of years to come to fruition. I was having a little burnout after being in a, you know, working in the COVID ward and happy to be here, Thank you.
Yeah. So the first question I want to ask you, I've already described to people what you do a little bit, right? You are an MD, you're at a major medical center, and you also on tougher cases that get referred to you and maybe some that come naturally to. You're using energy healing. How the heck did you make that transition? I'm sure they didn't teach that to your Baylor medical school. so how did this happen? Tell us your story. Sure. So as you mentioned, I'm a urologist, in full-time practice.
I am a regional referral specialist for chronic pelvic pain. But I see a lot of other stuff in addition to that. You know, folks send me their chronic fatigues and fibromyalges and you know there's a subset of patients that get frequent flyers in the hospital. They get these million dollar work-ups and the hospitals can't figure out what's going on. And so I kind of get all those folks sent to me. And, you know, I would say I kind of got good at this combination of things, mainly to help myself.
I had chronic fatigue syndrome for close to 35 years and a really severe brain fog. And I remember going to a bio-energetic psychologist back in 1997. and at that time I just, as collapsed, in my job and my relationship, personally, my health, and this bioenergetics psychologist told me, he goes, Eric, You're getting by on 3%. Wow. And I can look back now and I'm quite sure that was accurate. Again, I was studying pranic healing and a whole bunch of other modalities, trying to heal. I wasn't getting better to some extent.
Then in 2014, um, got admitted to the hospital and what was going on with that for six months prior to that, had these weird neurologic symptoms going. I had these weird twitches in my body and couldn't feel the hot water on my hands. And what got really bad was these cognitive symptoms and just trouble retaining information. Then other things were going on, like if I'd eat dinner after 7 p.m., I would wake up the next morning and the food was undigested in the stomach. The straw that kind of broke the camel's back.
was I was in the office one day and out of the blue, bam, my heart started racing at 220 beats a minute. It's a super, super attack of cardiac. And I getting dizzy and lightheaded and I got admitted to the hospital. I mean, just leading up to that, I felt so stressed and just mad at this neurologic stuff.
From Chronic Illness to Energy Healing 4:46
With all due respect to any neurologists that are out there listening, they're particularly good at treating some sort of chronic degenerative You're allowed to disease. So, uh, the hospitals came to see me one day and he said something and I can assure you it's not really one 10,000th of the clarity that I now understand this stuff, but I, he says something. And I got the idea. I'm stuck in this fight flight, free stress physiology. Yeah. Like I've stuck. You know, and then intuitively a second later, I said, You know, I realized, you know even though we say the body tends to heal itself, it doesn't heal very well when it's stuck in a chronic stress state.
I mean, Bruce Lipton used to talk about that. And so that's when I began to really desperately look for ways, how do I heal this? Some of it was energetic, some of was shifting physiology. Those two actually intertwine way more than people think and maybe we'll discuss some that today. And yeah, so that's kind of that story in the nutshell is really just to try and help myself. And then these principles work really well for, for patients. We're really chronically ill patients too. Yeah. So that so cool.
Your journey into the more holistic way of looking at health came from your own Challenges, which I mean, I don't want to say I'm glad you went through those challenges, but I am really glad that you made this transition because you're helping so many more people through your journey, Which is so beautiful. And by the way, i've gone through the same thing. In 2015, like I was telling you earlier, Like I've been having all sorts of like the craziest symptoms you've ever Can imagine like seeing double and, and you know, I would sleep 14 hours in a day and wake up at night and woke up totally exhausted.
Cause I was caught in that fight or flight. What percentage of people that are experiencing chronic illness, do you think are caught. In this fight-or-flight where their body just, it could heal if they got out of that, but it just can't heal because it's stuck in this hyper-vigilant state. Is that a large percentage you'd think? Yeah. I mean, in my opinion, experience, that's almost everybody. Wow. You know, it's interesting. Maybe a lot of your listeners have heard of the ACE study. ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences.
It was a study that came out in 1997. And the gist of it was that depending on how many adverse childhood experiences someone had, disease and early death and, you know, heart disease, lung disease. And liver disease in substance abuse and depression, anxiety and cancer and all this kind of stuff. It's interesting because when Dr. Felitti first actually presented that information to the NIH, I think it was around 1997, the participants here were actually incensed at the guy. Like this is BS. There's no way early childhood things affect people later on.
Fortunately or unfortunately, you know, it was it's true I think since then there's been about two or three thousand studies written about the a study And so if you understand that that actually is true early Traumas affect us later on and then you then kind of reverse engineer that you have to say well, how do they affect this? so one way just as you said they kind program how our physiology is going to run and really for the rest of our lives, for many of us, and they can cause limbic system dysfunction.
Limbic systems kind of the emotional and fear center of that brain. And it can program it. Of course, I'm simplifying it so that many folks are in this fight, flight, freeze autopilot and the physiology essentially does not turn off. And I mean, when we're in a stress state, those stress hormones do a number of things. They sensitize nerve fibers and pain fibers. So they mess them up. In my case, with my cognitive stuff and my heart conduction, my fast heart rate, I'm sure the nerve fiber were reacting to just being in high fight-flight state.
For all my chronic pain folks, such a big part of chronic is nerve hypersensitivity. And the stress hormone I think are a cause of that. There's more inflammation in the body, the hollow viscera, you know, that the bowel and the bladder don't work like they should. The immune system doesn't works. So there's a lot of things that happen as a result of that. Now, so just so we're not scaring people, there is hope though, right? These are things we can also help. There's absolutely ways to start shifting people out of a fight flight free stress state for sure.
And I love to talk about that. There is not as much within the realm of standard medicine and I think that's why people come to look at something like energy healing or I mean, as you know, billions of dollars are spent in this country alone for people seeking alternative healing modalities. Can I share something else that came up? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Please. Some other mind-body principles that I think are relevant here is this, that when stuff happens to us that at the time feels stressful, terrifying, overwhelming, a lot of times will freeze.
One of the things that happens is that the muscles and the fascia in our body lock up and get tense and tight to literally hold those emotions in the body. So they're not coming up to conscious awareness to bother us. And, and I think actually these areas of tight constricted myofascia, Wilhelm Reich, you know, used to call it reiki and armoring. I personally think that's the biggest. source of blocked energy in the body to begin with But the higher level question to me was always, why is the energy blocked to begin with, you know?
It's like, I'm pretty sure our creator didn't just look down and say, i'm going to take John and block his energy. There's a reason for it. And I think it's normally where these early stressors, traumas are locked in the myofascia. Now, one of the challenges is we can do things to loosen the myofascia, get the energy flowing, that's very good in a lot of instances, but also as you start to release these areas of constricted my of fascia what may start coming up to conscious awareness is some of the things that were kind of these uncomfortable memories, sensations, emotions, and it's important to learn how to deal with that.
And there's good strategies for doing that now.
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Chronic Stress 11:16
You know, I think if you just go do energy healing, just an energy heal someone, that's Good. Yeah. Sometimes I Think that a little bit like that motto we've all heard, you know you give a man a fish eats for a day and if he teaches fish for lifetime. So Energy healing in that regard is good. I'd like to see people go deeper, do something to start releasing the myofascia, let the energy flow. When that happens, there's some emotional stuff they're going to need to learn how to deal with. And again, happy to talk about some strategies from somatic psychotherapy that work well for that.
Yeah, no, I'd love to do that. And you're so right. I was just thinking about this earlier. Like, so many people are looking for the healer to come, you know, almost like a miracle, like from Jesus or something like that, where they're looking this miracle to happen where just, something outside of them comes in and heals them. But the reality is, that can be helpful and it can happen in probably a small percentage of cases. But the larger percentage of cases, we have to do the work, right? We've got to some of this work because it's shifting who we are.
It's becoming a, I don't want to say a different person, like you're not good enough right now, but it is becoming of person that's not responding the way that that old version of you is. And that is hard for someone just giving you energy to. So I'd love to hear some ways you help people do that. Yeah. So, uh, a lot of what I, I do is just informed by the work of like, you know, guys like Peter Levine, he started somatic experiencing it's a form of sommatic body-based work. I'll tell you just briefly kind of someone I saw in the office as a way of explaining this.
As I was working with this woman one time and she started feeling some very uncomfortable tension in her throat and her chest. And she goes, that's my ex-husband. People always do that. There's a comfortable sensation that it's that feeling that you're trying to get rid of. And we all do it in a minute of a second, bam, her mind labeled it, made it a thing, a story, and metaphor. First of all, I said, pretty sure your ex husband, boyfriend's way too big to have his whole body right here. So first of, it was not him.
Uh, so let's slow this down. There's some uncomfortable sensations there you don't like. And since they're there right now in this session, can I invite you to just let them be there? Almost no one does that by the way. They're trying to push it away, get rid of it out, think it figured out. Just doing that. She like took a deep breath. So the first thing I do when I work with folks is I kind of get them out of their head. Cause we're also in our head and then our thinking them. and bring people down into their body.
And then I want them to notice the emotions, the pain, as just a raw physical sensation and allow it to be there. Then what Levine has people do, which I think is brilliant, is something called pendulation. When you pendulate, like she was feeling this aeration like it, I said, Is there another part of your body that feels You know, safe, relaxed, comfortable, good right now. And she said, yeah, like my, you know my belly or something. I just said I'd like to invite you shift your awareness and attention to your belly and just feel that.
Yeah. Then go back to the throat and chest and then go. The pendulation sounds deceivingly simple, but for people who are really stuck in their problems, they have these deeply ingrained neural pathways in the brain and they're really good at feeling bad. And just introducing something simple like that is very powerful. So for example, I had this, because I see so much chronic pain. I saw like a fibromyalgia patient. She said, my whole body hurts. And we were with that. Then I said I'm wondering if there's another part of your body that feels different, okay, neutral right now.
And I know that's probably, there's, probably got to be somewhere. And with a little bit of coaching, she finally realized like her little toe on her right foot felt neutral. So you have to start somewhere, so I invited her to shift her awareness and attention to that little tow and then go back and shift your awareness of attention. By the way, it's for folks with chronic pain and longstanding emotional problems, It's really challenging even to get their attention off that. Cause again, There's like a deep scratch in the record and also part of them is thinking like, How is this ever going to get better unless I'm focused on it?
Unless I am focused. But I told her the way to start feeling different and better is to focus on feeling better and different. So with time and practice, she was able to do that. And then she suddenly realized my whole foot feels okay. Then we started opening up more real estate. That's not necessarily a one or two session thing. Those are just a few simple but extremely powerful ways of working with these things. If you're noticing emotional stuff or pain as a raw physical sensation, again with that thinking about it, figuring out, labeling it and adding meaning, which we all want to do, allowing it to be there, people oftentimes Just take a really deep breath.
That actually almost shifts out of fight or flight. Be with your truth here now. You can be with it as raw sensation. I'll share with you something that every time I've ever written this in any forum or set it on a webinar, people, I get more comments about that. And the comment is, You can trust the truth of what you're feeling as raw sensation without attributing a why. Trust the true to what your feeling a sensation because like in my case, I have issues with my wife and I think it's all her and then I'm like, God, if it is this bad and she's causing this and that, then we're going to split up.
It was a big relief for me to say you can't trust what's coming up these very bad feelings, but you don't necessarily have to attribute a Why. Yeah, that's such a great technique. I love that. So allow it to be there, right? Feel it and then find another part of your body that feels neutral or feels good. And then you said pendulum back and forth, which like you say, it sounds easier than it probably is for people that are. that are caught in these chronic pain. What do you think, what is your philosophy around chronic?
Myofascial Armoring and Emotional Storage 17:28
Like what's really going on? Because like you just said, you're able to take this fibromyalgia patient that her whole body hurt and maybe the whole. Body wasn't pain free, but you got her foot to be pain-free after. So the pain didn't have to. Why do we have so much pain? That's a huge problem. It's the precursor to the whole opioid crisis that we're having. Why do people have so much chronic pain? That's an issue I've struggled with in the past too. Yeah. I mean, a few answers. Again, I just go back to physiology so.
So I think that most folks with chronic. A lot of times they're folks whose physiology is stuck in this fight, flight, free stress autopilot. And so it's important to shift folks out of that. The other thing that, you know, as we talked about that leads to pain when, when folks, we store a lot of tension and spasm in our myofascia, our muscles and our fascia. And obviously those muscles are locked up intense and Spastic. You know there's less blood flow, there is less oxygen that causes a very real physical pain.
Yeah. Has anyone on your webinar talked about the work of John Sarno? Are you familiar? Yeah, I'm a big fan of Jon Serno. Actually, my son, he was a basketball player at Harvard. He had a concussion one year, didn't play one years, so he had an extra year to play at Rice University, a fifth year. And he went into the new school and his hip was hurting. His knee was hurting and then all of a sudden his back went out. They brought him into one of the medical centers there in Houston. The surgeon told him you've got one the largest herniated discs we've ever seen.
And they said, we got to put you under and they put a cortisone or steroids or something like that in, came out, didn't really help. And I told him about Sarno's work and he just listened to the mind body prescription three times while he was in his apartment over a couple of days. And his pain went away and never came back. He probably saw his herniated disc, but he doesn't have any pain. blemishes on his face, even at 23 years old, he was trying to eat super clean. After listening to that, not only did his pain go away, but his blemmishes went away and they'd never come back since.
So yeah, Sarto's an amazing influence on the pain part of the world. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, first of all, I'm so happy for your son. That is a great story. And I actually healed my own pretty severe chronic back pain, you know, 20, 25 years ago, strictly using Sarno's methods. Right. You know even years or decades later I'll bend down to pick up something heavy and my wife will go, oh, Eric, don't pick that up. you've got a bad back. and I look at her and say, no, i don' Yeah exactly.
But as you know, with Sarno's work, he talked about, yeah, the pain's real. It's due to this chronic tension and spastic muscles. But the higher level reason for that, He says, is that folks have these uncomfortable emotions they don't want to feel. And so he says the brain will cause the muscles to clamp down to cause a pain to take your mind off what you're anxious about. it's a kind of similar approach to these myofascial tensions. I think his explanation of the brain kind of purposely causing that might be a little different.
But yeah, physiologically, it's all the same. And you're right. As you know, he tells people when you are having pain, you have to ask yourself, I wonder what you were angry or anxious about. And then you don't even have to like, once you're aware of that, you doesn't have get rid of the emotions. Just understanding and letting yourself kind of be with what's there is how he cured the pain, right? Yeah. He just listened to the book and understood that concept you just said, and his pain went away.
And the surgeons wanted to bring him back in and he goes, I'm fine. I don' need that. Yeah, so that's amazing. So cool. This is really great stuff you're helping people with. With chronic fatigue, how did you heal that for yourself? Actually, Tom, I'd like to share a slide that I have. Yeah. Absolutely. Please put it up. I want to incorporate. Let me go to Share Screen here. There we go. Okay. So this is a model developed by Stefan Porges. And this actually extremely pertinent. I know it looks like kind of a complex screen, but let's just go over this briefly.
It touches on emotions and traumas and energy and physiology and all that. So at the bottom here in the green, you see this as ventral vagal. Down here, in green is when people are in that rest, digest and restore physiology. This is kind where the body tends to heal itself the best. Okay. Now it's interesting that they use the word social engagement down here, because when we're in this physiology, we were actually open to other people and the experiences of putting, letting other folks in. And, uh, sometimes the emotions that are kind of associated with this or maybe like joy and being in the present moment and groundedness and curiosity and compassion and mindfulness.
and then if you look at this, where I've got my arrow, this has arousal increases. You just changed that word arouse of the stress. We'd say as the stress increases, folks might actually go into more of a fight or flight, sympathetic state. And I even think of fight-or-flight, maybe a little different. So for example, if I'm fighting, you know, I am angry, enraged, moving towards the threat, and if i'm fleeing, it's more fear, anxiety, panic, trying to get away from the threats.
Somatic Techniques for Releasing Pain 23:08
As the stress increases more though, and again if you look at my arrow here, I'm soaking the word overwhelmed. If we get to the point where we're overwhelmed and I think people can imagine being like something's happening to a little kid, they're not really able to fight or flee or you know in a wartime thing or some sort of assault, then we'll go into freeze and freeze is actually another parasympathetic state. Where'd I go? It's another parasympethetic It's where there's a lot of kind of immobility.
There's disassociation or brain fog. We may feel dumb, depressed, helpless, hopeless, kind-of shut down. So I think a lots of folks with chronic fatigue, their physiology is in this freeze state. Now, what's interesting about freeze and like the somatic experiencing folks will talk about this. Even though we're kind of collapsed, this is a high energy state. There is lot of energy in the bodies of these folks, they're just not accessible. They're not feeling it. It's in there, it's tamped down by the physiology.
I consider this physiology that's going on, there's probably also a lot errors of the myofascia that are locked up, and that is where the energy is. Now the other important thing with the polyvagal curve, again I'm following this curve. It's really bad to be in freeze. I know I've spent 30 something years there. And it would be nice to go from this blue area down to the green where our bodies heal. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. As we start to come out of freeze, as you see I'm firing my arrow, you come into this fight or flight state.
So folks start to unfreeze and actually strong emotions come up that they may not be prepared for. They may notice this rage, almost this murderous rage coming up or this anger and they're pissed off all the time or they are anxious and fearful. And they think, my gosh, what's going on? I almost did better when I was numb. Yeah. It's important to understand this. This is a wonderful map. Fight or flight is actually a state where we're gaining more energy. Again, it's important to learn how to, in a slow, safe way, kind of come to be with those emotions.
In fact, Peter Levine, the guy who started the somatic experiencing class, his famous quote is, I think if you look at all his work and summarize it in one line, he said, Healing takes place when you're able to uncouple fear from raw sensation. You uncOUPLE fear. People come out of freeze, they start feeling powerful emotions. you can be with them in the ways we just described. Then you come on down into social engagement. And so, you know, the porges polyvagal model, it's a map for folks to know where they are now.
Again, as you could see, our emotional states correlate with our physiology. Lots of energy is present in those frozen or collapsed state, but it's not available. And as we unfreeze and release more energy, we may go into a sympathetic fight or flight with strong emotions that come up. I just think that puts so much of what we do in context. Yeah, I love that chart. You know, my, and my son said after his pain went away, he did have a lot of anxiety for a while right now. And this explains it, what you just said, but that's a sign of progress, right?
That's good thing, which is good. I loved the way you've reframed this whole thing. Yeah. I mean, every patient that walks into my office, literally, I more or less know where they are in that chart. The other thing is even I've started doing some presentations at the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine, almost, even though every doctor obviously learns physiology, I don't think most of them understand it in this way, and this is obviously a very usable way. This is even though they call the porous polyvagal model or theory, in my experience, which is now pretty extensive with this type thing, it explains a lot and it's very clinically applicable.
It's brilliant, actually. It just opens up doors to understanding how to work with these chronically sick folks. So chronic fatigue, it's important to find ways to shift folks out of this fight, flight, freeze, stress state, understanding that if they unfreeze, you have to be able to deal with the emotions that come up. A couple of the best ways that I know how do it is one is the TREs, the tension. Right. You introduced me to that. Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah, that is actually what cured my chronic fatigue, my neurologic stuff, My GI shutdown, and a lot of other stuff.
Can you talk briefly about that? What that, is and then we can let us know the website too. Cause David's website. Yeah. Absolutely. So I'll kind of, you don't mind just share what I tell patients in office. And so the folks that I share this with in the office have chronic illness, chronic pain that has not responded to the standard medical paranoid algorithms and stuff. So I'll say, first off, have you ever seen on TV or YouTube, the lion chasing the gazelle? Most people have seen that. And obviously that gazelles is running for its life.
Its body's in a high level of fight or flight. What's interesting though is that the Gazelle escapes and gets to a safe place and it won't do this unless it feels safe. It's body will shake and shiver. and tremor a little bit. And all animals and all mammals and, all of us have this built in shaking, shivering, tremoring mechanism that seems to do two things. First off, it seems, to turn off the fight, flight, freeze, stress switch. Now we've already said that most folks are stuck at, most Chronicle folks, are, stuck in that.
So that's not just an instantaneous statement. If you're stuck in that, and there's nothing that I'm aware of in standard medicine that undoes that to be able to do that is huge. In the animal kingdom, they do it all the time. That gazelle will literally, a few minutes later, go back, graze, take care of its young, hang out with the herd, it's in social engagement. Like nothing happened. Yeah, literally. The second thing that always tell the patients, like if you imagine that one minute that gazelles grazing, you know, then that sheet is creeping up and bam, in a half a second, it's running 50 miles per hour zigzagging.
There's a lot of charge and survival energy coursing through its musculature. And the analogy I give it, if you have a can of soda and you vigorously shake that can up, then now there's lot pressure in the can. Obviously, we don't want to rip the lid off and spray Diet Coke all over our interview. But what do we do? We just start cracking that lid and just you start to slowly, safely depressurize the When there's a lot of survival energy trapped in the musculature, unless it's released, it kind of is one of those things that leads to these myofascial constrictions.
Polyvagal Theory and Chronic Fatigue 29:28
So the second thing the tremors seem to do over time is it releases the charge and survival from the muscular. Another way of saying that it seems to unwind these chronic tension embracing patterns. And again, that's wonderful. I think a big part actually what keeps our limbic system stuck in this high alert dysfunctional state is interception. It's checking in what's going on in our body, the state of the musculature. Do I feel safe in my body? And TREs are wonderful for helping folks feel safe, and so I've taught probably 2,000 patients how to do it.
Obviously it's not everyone's cup of tea, just to be clear, but the folks that do, it it really wonderful. Hey, can I share a quick story about this that just shows? Yeah. And by the way, I love it, you introduced me to this and I absolutely love. So this is a really cool one. Let's make sure we give the website where they can go find out more about, this or resources. Yeah, Yeah, please share a story though. Yeah. Okay. So to understand how this works in like real life, so I saw two different women, uh, kind of in their twenties and thirties with pelvic pain and both of them had very tight spastic pelvic floor muscles.
One woman had vaginismus, which is the muscles in and around her vagina would tense tight, spasm up. She couldn't put anything in her vagina, whether it's a tampon or be sexually active. The second woman, her pelvic floor was so tight that when she sat down to try and urinate, it would sometimes take 5, 10, 15 minutes for that muscle to relax and open up enough so she could urinate. You can imagine 5-10-15 minutes every time you go to the restroom. That was a big part of her day. Now, because of my mind, body, dude, I asked both these women, you know, was there an event that happened that why these muscles would be tight?
Asked them a few times. I'm pretty congruent when I ask it because I know there probably was something and neither of them could remember anything. No conscious recollection. Yeah. So I taught them the TREs, and I'm by the way, a big exponent of going slowly and safely because it unfreezes the physiology, gets these airs of lactomyofascia to release really well. Okay. so I did just a short period of TRI with both of them, like a minute or two. Yeah, but after, during and right towards the end of that quick session, both them all of a sudden remembered what it was that made the intense and spastic.
One woman remembers she was date raped in college, just magically remembered that. And the other woman remembered something that, you know, that happened with her father. But just amazing, and that's how fast it will work. Just like that bam, unfreeze the muscles, immediately knew what it was. It can take some work to work through these memories, emotions, sensations. That's a real life example. When you clear that we typically get long-term relief of things like. And what Eric's talking about is a technique where you can actually, you get your body to start tremoring.
And once you learn how to do it, it's actually not that hard where are you start to release this tension that he's taking about in the myofascia. So, and what's the website again? It's traumaprevention.com. TraumaPrevention.com, which is not Eric's site, but this is a friend of his that he introduced me to that does amazing work and was a social worker. Actually, he told me the story that, He noticed over in the Middle East, like a bomb blast would go off and the children would freeze and all of a sudden they'd start shaking and then they could walk away, But the adults would hold on to it.
So really, really cool. That's amazing. How open are you? You just said you're lecturing now in medical school and how open our new MDs to some of these techniques? I mean, I'm sure it's not everybody, but are they starting to be a little bit more open the way that you are? Or does it take them having to go through something where, you know, like the journey you had? The answer is yes. Maybe a little bit of both. I'd say, I was here a couple of weeks ago, we were actually talking about tapping EFT.
These folks, the staff that was in the room with us said everybody was on the edge of their seats and no one was there on their phone. They seemed to like it. Yeah, I think, especially if it's presented the way I'm presenting it, it is not woo-woo and voodoo. Again, i've written books about chakras and I there's a role for that and there is a roll for oriental medicine and energy and i'm not disparaging it at all. I thing there are some purely energy based techniques that are fantastic that I still do regularly.
But I thinking if you explain this in terms of physiology and you can slip in some of the energy stuff because I feel like it I mean, the students, when they wake up in the morning, you don't need a double-blind university study to tell you how you're feeling and how much energy you have. Kind of know that stuff and know their sense of wellbeing. It's like, if you just ask yourself, am I okay? And you kind of BS the answer and you really just kind go inside. That tells so much about the state of your physiology, your energy, and your And stuff.
And so we just speak in these terms and I, from what I have, the feedback I've gotten, it's very palatable. So we'll see, you know. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, we had an interesting guest earlier in the week, Dr. Hemel Patel and he's at UCSD and. He's actually doing research in conjunction with Joe Dispenza. So, he's a PhD in pharmacology, but a researcher, and he has got some really cool stuff. He's doing a lot around people that meditate, because they do a lots of meditation at Joe Dispenza's programs, the changes in their body and health, getting rid of disease and pain, they can look at the blood, how the you know, other fluids in the body, which is fascinating.
So I hope more and more research is going to be coming to validate all the things you already know and are teaching everybody. What does work? Over 30 years of using mind-body techniques, some of the stuff I know is probably not as effective, what do you find most effective?
TRE, Trauma Release, and Case Examples 35:48
And you've shared some things already with us, but anything else beyond what you shared with this that people should consider? So kind of how I approach it in the office, I think that if there's someone has some past traumas that they're consciously aware of, that when they think about them, there is still a big emotional charge on them. It's really good to kind diffuse the emotional charges out of that. And so I like tapping, you know, EFT. I liked TAT, tapus acupressure technique.I think both those are awesome.
May I just share one other metaphor that I use that may be helpful here? So this metaphor, I'm going to talk about something called the plate theory, and I got to give attribution to this. I was taught this by one of my mentors, Bill Harris. He started a company called CenterPoint. They make this binaural beat technology called Holocene, which I love. That was also life-changing for me. But he talked about the Plate Theory. And so this is how I explain it. Everyone's probably heard that expression.
People say, my plate is full. And so I think what that means is that for all of us, our nervous system is like a plate or a cup, and there's only so much stuff we can handle coming at us from life before your plate gets too full. When it gets to full, when we get pushed over that neurologic stress threshold, It creates this generic stress or anxiety reaction in our body. And everyone reacts to that differently depending on how they learned to cope as kids. So some people isolate themselves. Some people are angry or anxious or depressed or engaged in addictive behaviors.
But all those things you could say are, are secondary to getting pushed over that threshold. Now, one of the things we know is that early life stressors or traumas, including in the womb, by the way, those actually cause our nervous system, our energetic system to develop in such a way that we will have a small plate. So one of the reasons why I'm fairly good at this stuff is I had a lot of early developmental trauma and my plate was the size of a thimble. And so I'll tell you right now, you can be a good person and smart, nice and big heart and blah, blah blah.
If that's the side of your plate, life is gonna push you over and you're gonna feel bad most of time. Okay. By the way, just a quick caveat. Everyone gets how you have a small plate how the bad stuff can make you worse. But this a teacher named gay Hendrix He's another body center. So I know too. Yeah, you know, yeah, he's a great guy So he came up with something called the upper limits the Upper Limits problem where he says that If you have a really small cup or plate, even seemingly good or positive things, you know, love, intimacy, great health, financial success can feel bad to your nervous system.
And then we may unconsciously sabotage things to kind of, limit the amount of energy. You know, and, you know people go to therapy and I thank God for therapists, but if you walk into the therapist's office and your cupper plate is the size of a thimble and you talk to the therapists and dump that out, dump everything out of your thymble. And if leave 50 minutes later and. Plates still the sides of the thamble, it's going to be hard to really get better. So the paradigm shift is what would happen if we could get a much bigger cuppa plate.
There's a few things that do that. Again, going back to your metaphor. I'm glad you shared that though. That's really cool. Now share with us. So we can expand the play. You can, you literally get a big, literally, Tom, if you go, just imagine what it would be if he went from having a thimble to like a four ounce big goal. And then it's like, You don't have to try and be positive and think differently. Just stuff just doesn't hit you. One of my friends is a psychiatrist said, Eric, some people life just hit some harder.
Yeah. You know, the same things. So, TRE is a big one in my opinion and experience. Again, that's why I like it. I'm a huge fan of this binaural beat technology. Holosync is the one I listen to. Yeah, again, as you know I have no affiliate links with anyone or any products, but that one, I would say if you, literally, you offered me a billion dollars with a B to go back today and somehow not have listened to Holasync, and I wouldn't not take your money. Wow. It really expands the size of the stress threshold.
That technology kind of gets us thinking more with life through a whole brain approach. It integrates the right and left sides of brain. I think new neural pathways are developed. And again, I have folks just because of nature of what I do who hear about me or see a book I wrote the forward to and they reach out and try everything. And it's not getting better and frequently a combination of either HoloSync or a TRE for a lot of folks that nothing else has helped is, are the answer. I've got a few now that just, you know, so yeah, at the end of the day, those two are.
Yeah. A few other things, things you were to ask me, what other kind of modalities do I like the Donna Eden five minute in the morning routine? Are you familiar with that one by the way? Yeah, yeah. Donna's a friend and we've had her on here too. Yeah. Per five minutes in the morning, you folks can find it on, on YouTube. I like a lot. The, uh, something else that I just love is, is called the five Tibetan rites of rejuvenation. Are you familiar with those as well or? Is that the one? Uh, yeah, I think I, it was an, a, an old book, right?
From a long time. Yeah, Peter Kelter's book among, among maybe others. You start with a spinning. Yeah, exactly right. That's awesome. So these are five yogic exercises. And they're very simple, by the way, it sounds like you've done, you're putting your foot behind your head. They're relatively simple.
Other Healing Modalities and Closing Thoughts 41:28
For a lot of people, they'll double or triple their energy levels. It's not like drinking a cup of coffee where you get a buzz for an hour or two. A lot folks just last all day long. I think they recharge the batteries, which is usually the kidneys, the kidney energy in the Chinese medicine system. They can dramatically increase people's libido. In fact, I used to joke with my patients, they can increase your libidos so much, it can almost get you in trouble. So be careful. But we've got, in Kelder's book, as you mentioned, there are five exercises.
He recommends doing 21 repetitions of each one. My teacher, Master Cho, was able to simplify them. They're much easier physically and you only do nine repetitions of each one and they're at least as powerful. Where do you find Master Chou's variation? His version is in the book that I co-authored called Your Hands Can Heal You. Awesome. How can people get that book, Eric? That's on Amazon and I think most bookstores. But yeah, the five Tibetans in that in my opinion are the crown jewel. They really do work.
Yeah. And this modified set is really way different. I've had some friends of mine who are really lean and super fit, and some of them were even having a little trouble with the original version. So this is a lot easier. I had a, I was teaching it to a friend and, uh, he was spinning and he almost crashed into my wallet and my pool. So I'm like, yeah. He probably shouldn't take a figure skating where they're spinning for like. Yeah. Last question. Why, why do techniques that just pump energy into the body sometimes make problems worse, before they get better?
Yeah, exactly. I think just cause if we're again, going back to my getting by in 3%, if everything's locked up and it's blocked up for a reason and you force too much energy through, I just think that that can make folks a lot worse. It can either bring up too repressed material. You can just kind of. You know, generally feel bad. I mean, I think like, you know like maybe that's what Kundalini syndrome is like people, a spiritual teacher helps someone awaken way too much energy. And it's just, yeah, too, much too fast.
Yeah. It's important to maybe watch, be very cautious with some of these techniques like awakening the microcosmic orbit or doing a small universe type thing that just think you need to use a little bit of caution if you have someone with a lot of trauma and stuff like that. Okay, great. Hey, I'm so glad we finally got you on our summit. You're amazing. I know everyone wants you to be their doctor. Well, that can't happen, but your book, hope that your hands can heal. Right. It would be a great way to connect with you and any other ways to.
Do you write or anything on the internet or where people can follow you? I've written a beautiful summary. I wrote the foreword to a book. called Flowing Zen. It's a Qigong book. That's actually my favorite school, but it's really a very good forward. They can even go to Amazon and look inside the book for free. But it is a great book and a really good foreword. Honestly, I actually have my spare time. I like to proofread and edit books. I've done eight books by a spiritual teacher named Santata Gamana, and he just wrote his autobiography, which I gotta say is just, it's mind-blowing.
And I feel like I'm editing for someone like a Ramana Maharshi type level. Just- I want to read that one, yeah. Yeah, It's called Liberation. He's always written under the pseudonym, but I just don't think you can write like this about these levels of consciousness. with that actually having attained them yourself. So yeah, that's what I'm working on. And I don't really, you know, I, don' have any product and services. I've just kind of in the trenches doing the work and maybe someday that'll change, You know?
Yeah. Yeah, at the end of the day, learn the TREs if you can. We've got some YouTube videos on my YouTube channel. One is called T-R-E and Me, which tells a little more. Under Dr. Eric Robbins on YouTube. Just Dr Eric robbins. Okay. Awesome. There's some really good videos there actually. And yeah, that's it. Fantastic. Well, you are a gift to the world, Eric. Thank you so much for being on and amazing job today. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health.
Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks dot com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on DoctorTalks, real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.
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