Learn to Systematically Dismantle and Retrain the Hidden Physical Reactions That Eventually Lead To Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, Addiction, and Chronic Pain
Bob Gardner
6 min read + 4 videos (4-5 min each)
April 3, 2024
Despite frequent talk about the "body-mind connection" through books like Van Der Kolk's The Body Keeps The Score or Peter Levine's Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma, few people actually place the body front and center as both the source and the solution for our mental and emotional struggles. They speak with top-down language, describing how thoughts create emotions and traumatic effects in the body. What they often don't realize, however, is that our thoughts and emotions are direct by-products of how our body first instinctively reacts to something in the environment. They do not—and never have—come first.
What does come first are the rapid, non-verbal, microscopic, neurological reflexes that no amount of talking through the situation, aha moments, or emotional breakthroughs will ever fully retrain. Because they live far deeper in the body than our consciousness, psychology, and memories. Which is why, for all the good that therapy really can do to help a person manage or cope with emotions and thoughts, it still does not address the true biological root of all of our suffering, trauma, and pain.
The good news here is that there are other, complementary ways to access the nervous system's habitual patterns and retrain them through direct physical feedback and guided responses. This approach bypasses the thinking mind and rapidly teaches all the little reflexive brains scattered throughout the body—known as nerve ganglia and individual cellular responses—another way to react to the onslaught of life's stimuli without creating a cascade chain of suffering like it used to.
Carmie speaks of her struggle with health issues, lifelong anxiety and depression, and an auto-immune diseases, and the impact of this approach
STICK WORK™ is one of the various methods I have found for accessing and retraining these non-verbal mental, emotional, and physical reflexes. It comes with a long and almost forgotten history, developed by a people facing everything from the constant threat of war, invasion, and slavery, to starvation, bitter cold, illness, grief, and loss. Their question was not, "How do I learn to cope with the trials of life?"
No. Theirs was, in my personal opinion, a far better one: "How do I learn to live in such a way that no circumstance, no matter how dire, ever robs me of peace, joy, and well-being?"
Their answer to that question—and to what most of us would consider an extremely challenging life—went deeply contrary to most modern approaches. It included neither psychological diagnoses nor emotional validation. Not even retelling their story or trying to see the past in a new light.
No. They had little to no time to sit down and talk through most of their ills (not that they didn't do it at all. That seems to be a fairly natural human impulse). They still needed to hunt, fight, parent, build, travel, and everything else that life demanded. So instead of clinging to their misery, they confronted it, working directly and intensely into the body to root out the physical source of all of their fear, anxiety, trauma, and despair so they could move on with life.
My First Taste of Freedom
This approach to working with the body—as noted in the first video—came out of deep Siberia, forged and refined in some of the most horrific situations that humans have ever endured. It enabled many of them to cope with the injuries, starvation, and horrific abuse of the Russian gulags.
One such survivor eventually passed on his skills to a young man in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, the late 1980's. That man taught my teacher, Aleksej, whom I met in 2014 under the rather bizarre circumstances I detail below. That encounter so quickly and drastically reshaped my life that I dropped everything to understand it.
Now imagine the scene. We’re in the back corner of a gym floor at a community center somewhere in the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada.A friend of mine lies next to me as Aleksej alternates back and forth between us, his soft, melodious voice calmly pointing out where we need to relax as he uses his sticks with pinpoint precision to release muscles I don’t even know I have from tension I don’t know I am carrying. All the way down my spine. In between every rib. Up under the rib cage. Nose smashed into the dirty gym floor as he works along the base of my skull. Poking here. Prodding there. His thick Russian accent breaking through the background noise of a hundred sweaty fighters punching, kicking, slashing, disarming, and taking each other to the ground.
“Very good, my friend. . . . Relax fingers. Da, da.”
A sharp intake of breath from me. Fears come to the surface. I feel weak. Scared. Vulnerable. Exposed. Not good enough. Afraid of discovering that I don’t have what it takes. Aleksej’s voice pins me down from somewhere overhead.
“One more moment, my friend . . . Exhale. Relax hip . . . Da, now stomach . . . Opa. Very good. Now make sound ‘hahhhhhhhh’.”
My body deflates. I feel a tremendous surge of new blood and warmth in an area I never knew was lacking it. Several tears trickle from my eyes—not from pain or relief, but from sadness.
“Very good. Very normal. Slava te Gospodi nas. Gospodi pomiluj.” The words of an orthodox prayer wash over me as Aleksej finally puts his sticks away. “Glory to Our Lord. Lord have mercy.”
In the weeks and months following that experience, I keep reliving it. Never before have I been through such intensity and discomfort administered with that level of compassion, patience, and gentleness. I feel in many ways like a completely different human being on the inside. Standing straighter. Less afraid of the future somehow. Not as angry or reactive. I begin finishing projects and making other changes in my life that I haven’t previously been able to—but without having to use as much willpower to do it. Almost as if it’s happening on its own. I want to know why.
Why, after having spent so many thousands of hours learning to understand and control my body, did Aleksej’s broken-English approach open up and create such incredible and widespread change in so short a time? Why did my thoughts and lifelong fears come to the surface and somehow dissipate without having to talk through them, know exactly what they were, or even know where they came from?
I can’t ask Aleksej. He vanished from the scene as quietly and unceremoniously as he had appeared. It will be several more years before I get the privilege of training with him one-on-one to learn his art. And when I do, I find that he doesn’t have the answers I want. He has a profound skillset that allows me to access what I need. But because he hasn’t been through the same kind of emotional struggle, the answers I want have to come from me.
Note: The above is a short excerpt from my recent book Built For Freedom available as a PDF or on Amazon and Audible. Be sure to contact us for the free guide after purchase.
Chad came not knowing how to clear out decades of past traumas and deep personal struggles from his body despite over a decade of experience working directly with the body as a chiropractor.
What I still had to figure out was the direct link between all of this muscular tension, fascial adhesions, postural deviations, and the mental/emotional landscape riding on them. Because I didn't want these cathartic releases and emotional shifts to be either accidental, random, or temporary. So, without a teacher to guide me, I spent years training, searching, and scouring the globe for answers from both modern and ancient sources:
4 years training with an old-school Zen mindfulness teacher
4 years certifying as an RCST® (Registered Craniosacral Therapist)
10 years certifying and training as a Russian Systema instructor
5 years with Aleksej, training in this Russian/Siberian Stick bodywork
7 years certifying and training in various forms of yoga and breathwork
6 months training as a Postural Alignment Specialist
4 months certifying up to level 4 in Fa Kung Ch'i Kung Healing
countless hours scouring anatomy books, dissections, and videos
This does not include the 28 years I've also spent training and instructing in Chinese Kung Fu, Tai Ch'i, qigong, and various forms of Buddhist and Taoist meditation techniques. Not to mention the countless hours testing this on myself.
Kimberly was initially afraid of the STICK WORK™, but it allowed her to set down the long-standing traumas and negative self-image that had been holding her back.
The end result of all this study and search has now helped thousands of people let go of deep depression, grief, anxiety, chronic pain, addictions, childhood traumas, PTSD, OCD, and much more. All from working directly with the tiny, unconscious physical reactions that form the foundation of all these problems. Once you catch them in the act and then retrain them, happiness, health, and well-being start showing up all by themselves. Without the need for expensive surgeries, prescriptions, or a lifetime of continued therapy.
Because freedom is a skill, not a pill. At first, it takes some conscious, focused effort. Then simple awareness and basic practice as the muscle memory takes hold. Finally, it happens as a unconscious reflex—happiness on auto-pilot.
STICK WORK™ is one of the key methods I have found that can takes years, even decades, off of that process. Because life is too sweet and too short to waste coping with misery.
If this is something you'd like to experience for yourself or learn how to do, check out the resources below.