Raise Your Energy. Rock Your Life!

Introduction and Tristanu2019s Healing Story 0:00

Welcome back to the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit series everybody. This is of course version 5.0 healing the energy body. I'm really happy to bring to you today a new colleague for me, Tristan Truscott, who back in 2000 started on a healing journey when a crippling back injury forced him to end his martial arts career. After five years of intense pain and a plethora of alternative therapies and an unsuccessful $90,000 surgery, he and his partner became deeply disillusioned by all the failed treatments and false hope people were giving them that they pushed onward, doing their best to find answers and stay hopeful.

And they discovered the power of qigong in 2005, and after just a few months of working with this powerful lifeforce energy, his back was completely healed and he began teaching again. So now, to share a forward, they founded the Satori Method Academy, where they started creating online programs that help people not only heal, but also cultivate physical vitality and increased levels of joy. Welcome to the summit, Justin. Hello. Hello. So grateful to connect with you and share some insights and see what comes through.

Yes, I, I mean, I love I always start my interviews with what brought you to the work that you're doing and that was embedded in your bio. So I really appreciate that. And one of the methodologies that I use in my own world is Ayurvedic medicine. And, you know, we talk about Marma points and 72,000 structures and channels that connect the the emotional body through the energy body to the physical body and how important that is. So I would love to start with these energy pathways and the channels in the body, and why people need to know about them and care about them.

That's a topic I love to talk about.

Energy Pathways, Meridians, and Fascia 2:06

So, you know, growing up, I mean, I was into nature and surfing and being in tune, but I thought that that stuff was kind of out there. Like, I actually made fun of people doing tai chi in the park and talking about energy because I didn't feel it. And, you know, a little bit later in my life, I had a lot of internal angst and stress and psychosomatic disorder showing up. So one of my teachers said, you need to learn how to meditate and I knew he was right. I knew I had too many mind. So I started to meditate.

And there was, an Indian practice of meditation and pulling the energy up through the spine. And I stayed open to it because I wanted to get out of my angst. And, lo and behold, this energy thing is real. I felt energy moving inside my body, and I felt throbbing sensations and all these interesting portals, if you will, were opening up, but I still hadn't felt it in my hands or flowing through my arms. So it was an interesting thing. And then I was through. That back injury you talked about led to the practice of qigong.

So qigong is the grandfather of Tai chi. So we're coming full circle here. I'm now learning tai chi and qigong, and I actually start to feel this energy that we're talking about between my palms. And, there are little gates in your hands in the center. It's a beautiful way to start feeling energies where healers emit their life force from, and they're portals that you can start to feel this bioelectrical energy. But they're associated with these channels, the meridian lines. Right? So I remember my first time in acupuncture going in for a treatment, seeing the map on the wall and all this intricate internal irrigation of these mapped out pathways.

And I'm like, how did they know? How do they know this stuff is so incredible? But there's an intuition and there's a knowing when you start to work with energy, you can feel it. And so I started to do that qigong exercises and doing these types of movements, and I could feel it between my hands, but then I could start to feel it moving through these lines, these channels. And I've since come to understand that you can feel more of this if you move through the body using. So you don't want to abort the physical exercises that you know and that you love.

You can actually go through your body. And that's what's beautiful about qigong is it has lengthening and stretching and twisting and squeezing movements. And we're finding and we'll dig into this. I'm sure that your body is coated with this, material called fascia and that this fascia, it's like a casing that surrounds every muscle, every bone, every organ, and that there are parallels between the meridian lines running through the fascia, and that if you squeeze and open this, you can actually start to feel the, the g, the energy more.

So that's kind of what's been happening in my world. It's it's been amazing. So what's the connection between this and disease. Energies. Everything is what I've come to realize in my life. If the energy isn't flowing, we're going to have, a depletion that, you know, they might call it a deficiency in our world. Kind of like a garden hose. Those meridian lines, if they're pinched off, if there's a tree that fell on your garden hose and you turn the water on, it's going to get backed up on one side and then depleted on the other.

And so these blockages can lead to a host of disorders or dis ease of obviously we see them mostly in the physical form because that's where they manifest first. But I started to notice them affect my psychology. So a disease as you know also well is it's emotional, it's physical, it's energetic, it's spiritual. So there's many ways in which it can manifest. But typically it's going to be in the physical body. I think I heard you say something like it gets the most press. Yeah. Gets the most press because we're a little bit more oriented to our physicality.

Right. Yeah I talk about it like the monitor on the screen. You've got the hard drive over here and all this software running this information. But it shows up on the screen. The screen of the body doesn't lie. But it's such a beautiful teacher for me. Physical pain now has become a sweet friend because I stopped muting it when I was going through before my my terrible injury. I was just pushing, pushing, pushing to show up. I would wear these suits. I was a martial arts self-defense instructor and I was training a lot of girls going off to college, and I wanted them to beat the, you know, what out of me so that I knew that they could protect themselves.

So I'd wear these suits, and I took a beating over time, you know? But I kept snipping the wire. It's like you're driving your car, and you look at the dashboard and the red light comes on, check the engine oil. And I just kept snipping it, and, I was just ignoring these signs. And so it backfired. Now I don't ignore them anymore. Yeah. Listen. Yeah. Are you still teaching martial arts?

Movement, Breath, and Rebuilding Trust 7:01

I teach internal martial arts now, so I personally like to punch and kick and jump, and I can do all the things that I couldn't do for a long time. So I got my life back. I got my health back. I'll be 55, this year, tomorrow. And, I can still kick, but I'm feeling amazing at 55. But, I really love what's happening with these internal arts and these energy body techniques that we're talking about, because it's changed everything for me. I feel vibrant at 55. My body doesn't have disease, and if it does, I know how to create ease quite quickly.

I'm loving the joy that I'm feeling when your energy's flowing. You just. Your natural calibration is to feel good. When my body hurts, I'm moody. I'm cranky. It sucks. My life force. It affects everything. So. Yeah. Yeah, I'm 57, and I feel so much better than I did on those 30. It's amazing. Thank you for being such proof that this stuff works. Same to you. Yeah. That's amazing. So how do people access this? How do you open these channels that I, I really do think that gentle physical movement is a great first step, especially if someone's body is depleted or hurting.

Sometimes some of the things that we're shown to do, they're a little bit too hard. And I love yoga, but some yoga techniques are a little bit challenging for people. Going to the gym, you know, that can be a turnoff. I'm about to do a program where a lot of people have given me information about where they're feeling stuck right now, and so many people, there's already 7000 people that are like getting ready to do this thing. And I've been reading through their comments and they're so frustrated because they're not able to stick with the routine or the routines are too hard, or they don't even have the energy to do the routine.

So to answer your question, if it's something that's doable, something that's gentle, something that actually gives an immediate result, we're more likely to do it. So I mentioned earlier fascia, one of the cool things about some of the chee-kong, because I'm a big believer in this, is learning to squeeze the body and squeeze the skin, and then releasing it kind of creates like a tourniquet and a pumping. It's also really good for the lymphatic system squeezing, lengthening, gentle twisting movements which you can get from tai chi and qigong and certain yoga.

I think that's a great place to start. The one thing that I'm finding is that if you hydrate before you do these type of techniques, as you're squeezing on that fascia, which is right below the bottom layer of the skin and as we said, surrounds all the muscles as you squeeze and lengthen that fascia. It's made of protein and water. It will absorb water. So make sure you have water in your system when you're doing things like this and it'll rehydrate that fast. And what's interesting about fascia is it's supposed to be more like a gelatinous material.

It's very good at protecting our muscles. It's got a fluidity about it and also acts a little bit like an ace bandage. It holds things in place, but if it's dehydrated, it can get brittle. It can kind of crack, it can stick together, it can create adhesions, restrictions in your blood flow. It has nerves inside of it. So you start getting these maladaptive signals flowing through your body. It's communicating with every part of you in your organs. And so you want to flush it with water. So I would say that's the first place to start.

Get into your skin, get into your fascia, squeeze release length and twist and then move into the energy body. And how do you move into the energy body? You pay attention after you do the squeezing and the releasing type techniques, you stand still and there are postures that are very helpful. Or your knees are slightly bent. You can do it sitting to a little roundness through your arms and your shoulders, and you just listen. And you're teaching your so called an internal martial art. You're teaching your awareness to go inside rather than outside.

And we're very externally drawn, but there's so much knowledge and information inside. And energy is information. So as you start to go in, you can start to sense where your energy might be blocked and you can go into those areas. It's incredible. The more tune we get, we know if an organ needs to be flushed, we can feel if the kidneys are parched, we can feel if muscle tissue is tight. But we have to develop that awareness and that sensitivity. So I would say through your body, get those internal nerves firing, start listening, stand or sit and just notice.

And then what I think is the best next move is gentle, slow, kind of flowing movements to start to circulate that life force. Because the squeezing opens the channels, the meridian lines, the pathways. And so now if you're moving gently, it's like you're encouraging that water to start flowing. You have an internal irrigation. So you're irrigating your system. And as that energy starts to flow through the whole body, what I'm finding is the energy rises. And as energy rises, all boats are lifted.

So all the organs feel better, your mood feels better, your joints start to open up. So we talked about squeezing, paying attention and then gently flowing. That would be how I would start. I do something called the five Tibetan. So every day love it. You know what those are? Yeah, those are great. Yeah. And, you know, I think, and then and then I'll sit and meditate. But I think that opening is so important because I don't know what you're experiences with people when you talk about meditation, often they're glazed eyes.

You know, I can't can't hold my mind still like I don't have time. I get too distracted, you know, and that opening up of your energy channels and drawing your focus and intent, attention and intention inward, you know, makes it possible to be able to sit that and so this is really important what you're talking about here. You're nailing one of the main things people are saying about meditation is I don't have the time and it turns up the noise too much. But going through the physical body you're giving your mind a job.

So it's focusing. You're drawing your intention internal. So you're already starting to meditate in a way. And then it's so much easier. I would notice this in my martial art classes we would meditate in the beginning of class and we would meditate at the end. And I wanted to see the calibration between the two points. Now these people that back in the day were punching and kicking and fighting and joking and doing all this crazy stuff, but I didn't want them to leave class jacked up and adrenalized and go out there and start a fight.

So I got a share, a lesson. We're going to have a meditation.

Heart Coherence, Meditation, and the Field 13:55

They always told me it was so much easier to meditate at the end of class than in the beginning. They came to the realization because they moved their body, they got the heebie jeebies out. They were more calm. I call it body mind aligned. They were aligned. And then they started having more connected experiences. I believe there's a knowing within each one of us that when we get quite enough and we can listen, we get an right. It could have had a VA. That's what the story is. It's like an awakening.

And as you get more dialed into this stuff, you start to be shown things. I think the body, first of all, is a teacher. And then there's information in there that we're missing because our bandwidth is too cramped down. We open this thing up and all of a sudden you just know stuff and it's amazing. Well, it's it's interesting what you're speaking to right now. I, I believe that autoimmunity is a disconnect from the body. Right. You're in a combative relationship with yourself. The mind and the body are not in alignment.

And so what you're offering here is a practice and it is a practice. It's not a one and done everyone. It's practice. Only a daily practice. Being able to connect to the wisdom of the body instead of popping it over the head and dragging it behind you and expecting it to, to be what you want it to be instead of what it's what it's needing to communicate to you. So, yeah. Yeah, I have found that the more I study the energy arts and there's some interesting esoteric stuff out there that's not all that Western friendly and easy to digest.

But if you stick with it and you study your science and you listen to the wisdom of the body, you get it. And I've noticed that there's, a survival instinct in each one of us. As a self-defense instructor, I saw that. I saw the whites in people's eyes. I saw the amygdala was firing. I saw the stress, the adrenaline dump, all of that. And then I saw on the other side of that the ease, the flow, the parasympathetic nervous system kicking in that that just smooth, healthy, homeostatic forces, perspective.

And when you work with energy, it's important in the beginning to do some nice slow, deep diaphragmatic breaths. You have these gates and some call them chakras. So I know this is not new to you. The energy wants to rise through these gates and wants to move up into and through the heart center. But what I've discovered is if your body's in survival or threat mode, they're very hard for the energy to rise above this level. The heart's like, I don't trust this. This is I'm in. You're in survival mode.

I can't open up. And what I found with myself and others is when we could calm and nourish those lower energy gates. Through gentle breathwork and different techniques, we can start to feel the energy rise up in the heart. And when you get into the heart, oh my gosh, there's so much healing here. And I know this is an important part of your work. People are holding this thing down. There's a lot of blocked energy here. So if we can, I think, work on those lower energy gates first, get the body back into a trusting state and be willing.

Just an invitation. Let it come. Let it rise. There's so much healing that can happen in here. And then and then, of course, the heart starts informing the brain and you get into brain, heart coherence and all kinds of crazy cool stuff happens. But do some deep dive, traumatic breathing. I like to hold a pillow because I can get a little proprioceptive feedback. I can get that diaphragm massaging that long vagus nerve, get a little vagal nerve toning going on, and just that little bit because sometimes it's hard for people to kick the diaphragm muscle back on.

It's locked down and shut down. There's a lot of emotional angst here. This is a gentle pillow. You just hold it, hug it. Now we know why kids love their teddy bears, right? Feed feedback. Right? And just hold on to that thing and just breathe smooth and soft and nourish yourself and see if that doesn't really help to. That's really beautiful. And I always say, if there's nothing that you do in terms of therapy or any other practice, it's going to stick. If you don't feel safe. Yeah. And so those root, gates or chakras or energy centers, you know, that that is the place to begin the calming for sure.

Yeah. And so in the safety aspect, you know, I, I've seen a lot of people with autoimmunity feel unsafe in their own body. Right. So the mental belief system of not feeling safe, I can't trust this body. Yeah. It feels like the practices that you are teaching and talking about here are healing for that. Yeah. You can learn to trust the body and its energy system. I love that conversation line. I didn't trust my body didn't trust me I didn't trust my body after my back injury, my brain certainly picked up a lot of maladaptive signals because my body's telling my brain, this hurts my brain, saying, okay, I'm going to shut this thing down.

I'm not going to allow it to move because I love you. It was trying to help me. And I got stuck in this proprioceptive feedback loop where I just, you know, everything shut down. And yeah, it absolutely was a trust factor. So what I had to do was gently brush up against the area where I felt the reactive patterns or the tightness or the shallowness in my breath. And listen closely to your breath. And then I noticed in martial arts, when someone's scared and the body flinches the brain, the command center is trying to protect itself.

You go and then you pull the breath in. And a lot of people are in a low grade stress response or flinch response and don't even know it. They're shallow breathing. Their nervous system is in sympathetic, you know, stim. And so I started making the sound of my breath on the exhale. What's the difference? There's a funny analogy when somebody's trying to go to the toilet and they certainly they can. Someone turns the water on, they hear the water running the oh, okay. So I knew that something about the sound going through my auditory system could help elicit that parasympathetic state.

So I would and then I would brush up where the tightness was in my body. So this is a physiological component. And I move where my back would hurt. And I'd. And I started to reclaim trust. My brain said, oh, okay. That didn't hurt. You're okay. I wasn't in the gripping. Oh, I got a little more range of motion. I got a little more freedom. And through that breathing in that sound and that recalibrating of the signal between the brain and the body, I unwound the mess I put myself in. So I hope that helps somebody.

I think developing trust is what you were up to there between right your mind and your body. And I love that. And I appreciate that teaching for all of you listening, that you have to be able to trust your body and your body trust you. And so this is a beautiful way of engaging in that. That's another thing about autoimmunity that I noticed. A lot of people are not embodied. There's with a history of trauma. There's a very quick dissociative pathway out because the wise mind of the child said, I don't really want to hang out for this trauma that I'm enduring.

I think I'll leave now. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And so being able to embody and occupy, right. This this container is what you're describing with qigong. It's my church. My body's a temple. We always say here, through the body, I can become awake. If you look at the ancient practices of yoga, qigong, these, these different arts, it was through the body, the asanas, the postures, the poses. They were trying to find their way back to their life force, into their flow. And then we said, I think you said in the beginning, about raise your energy.

I like to raise your energy, rock your life. Because as the energy rises through the physical temple, the frequency of that energy shifts. And as that frequency energy information. Right. So as you're we could talk about tapping into other states of consciousness and the field. And I love to go there in my meditations. I like to kind of not be in my senses and just sort of be in a place where I feel like I'm available information. And in the field there's like this pure love. So I like to talk about just pure love.

And I want to receive that data, that information. I want to align to it because it got all these other signals going on, like a bad radio station is just not dialed in. So through meditation, opening up the bandwidth of my brain, I feel like I can tap that energy in that frequency now can start to and itself up to a more divine frequency. And so when we start going into those stages in qigong, that's where it gets a little more esoteric. But hack man, let's go there. Let's bring the frequency up so our mood changes or more joyful, our tissues say, hey, we're having a party here.

Let's heal. You know all is well, and you start to get rid of those maladaptive signals. Bring things back online. Ease, flow, rest. I just smiling more in qigong. They have something called the inner smile. So you want to feel a smile right here and then inform your face, even if it's a little hard at first you're like, because I didn't smile for a long time and it felt weird. I've put a smile on you now get it from a teacher, you know? But now it's a glow. They call that Shen in qigong. It's like when the energy hits the heart, you start to glow.

You see it in people's eyes. You see it in their skin. I think it's vibration. It's a frequency. When. When you're in the place that you're talking about right now in, I call it the grid, the field and more for the genetic field that we join with everyone else who's meditating. I remember one of my, shamanic teachers in Peru saying, every time you open your mesa, you're joining all others with their open mesa. At the same time, anyone that's in meditation, anyone

Self-Compassion and Closing Reflections 24:18

that's in prayer, you're joining in the field, all of those, right? And so to me, that's a really beautiful cure for the social isolation of the last three years to. That's beautiful. Yeah. So you're you're joining everyone in the field. You're recognizing that you are not alone, that we are all in this grid and we're contributing to it. And, and the way that I think about it is it's then it becomes not optional. If we know we're contributing to the grid, then we want to make sure that we're raising our vibration intentionally and consciously.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think good energy in the energy stew. Yep yep yep. Yeah I would benefit from it. And and so can everyone else. That's a gift. Yeah. To be able to get there we have to go beyond, Well, at least the way I look at it, we've got to go beyond those senses that are distracting us, right? All all of that information that wants to pull us into the old story. And so it's so important to calm the nervous system and allow ourselves to enter into a state. The martial arts that I studied, they called it mushin, which basically meant no mind.

What I've come to understand is that they were talking about the brain and the prefrontal cortex and just too much thinking and angst, and that to move past that prefrontal and allow yourself just to go inside little world, go a little bit deeper and go beyond the senses, be less externally focused, draw your attention inward that that's such a beautiful practice. So I would say meditation, like sitting meditation because we've talked about it. I would pair that with my chee-kong because they say chickens are moving meditation.

I would still practice sitting and drinking, withdrawing into that quiet, still place so we can do what we're talking about. Yeah. And I can say everybody that that wasn't a natural state for me. It's, it's been a long practice. Yeah. I have a very. Thank you. Thank you. Mind you and I both, it doesn't stop even after all these years. It's still. Yeah. Right there for me, I call it I call it one of the strongest parts of my ego strata. The figure out or the figure with the hair figuring everything out.

I got this. I'll, I'll, I'll I'll handle that. And you're like, wait a minute. Last time you did a terrible job. Yeah. No. Yeah, yeah. Let's just be quiet to take it takes a little coercing. Yeah. I have to kind of give it a little bit of a. Okay, well, you're going to get a kibble. There's a reward here for you to, come fast. And the. It's soothing, you know, it's a win win. So I, I study marketing, so I'm always marketing to my ego. Hey, listen, buddy, there's something here for you. And I kind of just tell it that and it's like, oh, okay.

Look at my hands and watches me train my dogs. I'm a little bit of a dog whisperer. And I have three of them. And he, instead of kibble, uses the peanut butter treats, like, oh, like, so we always are telling our, our ego selves, you know, we say yes and give him a peanut butter treat. You can get some peanut butter. That's right. Hey, peanut butter works for just about everything. I agree. Oh that's funny. So you have a, a free gift that you're offering our audience to get them started on this journey.

Would you like to come? Yes. Well, we've been talking about it, so why not hook you up with, qigong for beginners? So over many, many years of teaching now, this art, I know what the common questions are. I know what the sticking points are. And I created a program specifically for you to get started with it. Even if you're old school qigong, these are essentials that I think you can build upon, their fundamentals that that just give you a great start. But they also lead to great success as you build.

So like with anything, the foundation is essential. And if we're going to go further and further and further, we've got to have a good base. So this gives you an amazing base. There are nine exercises. They're super easy to do, but they're super powerful. We're going to cover the breath. We're going to get into the fascia a little bit. We're going to help you with your stances. We talked about the postures. We're going to get into that anyway. There's nine of them. So enjoy. It's a great way to get started with this.

Beautiful. All right. Thank you so much. Is there anything that we have not touched on that you would just really love to share before we go? You know, it came up in an interview the other day and I'll just drop this for you. They said, what's the last thing you want to share? And I just was like, oh, it's about compassion, self-compassion, because I don't know about you guys, but I've been so hard on myself. It's so hard on myself. I should have known better. I should have healed by now. You know, more.

You know, your sensei, all of this self-judgment and heaviness. And I was like, I gotta stop that. I gotta give myself a break. You know? It's okay to ask for help. It's okay not to know all the answers. And I shifted my vibration when I did that, and I got just a whole lot more loving with me. And I'll tell you what your energy loves when you do that, and it will rise. So give yourself a break. Self-compassion. And then we can truly have compassion for others. And that's where I'm at today. I know what it's like to feel broken.

I know what it's like to feel off. And because of that, it's been a gift in disguise that a teacher said suffering is grace in disguise. I said, yes, sir, but not when you're going through it. It doesn't feel like grace, but when you're on the other side of it, it is grace. And so I would just leave you with that. That there's a grace inside this journey, this healing. And use it as a beautiful awakening of compassion and self-love. And maybe you can serve somebody else through your story like you're doing that.

Kesha. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. All right, everybody, until next time, be well.