hello everyone welcome as everyone's entering the room we'll give a just a few moments to have everyone settle in and uh I'm doing a few technical things behind the scenes here yes welcome everyone see a lot of and so I'm gonna ask everyone I'm gonna just do this mic uh let me just make that setting here uh no okay um wow A lot of people are still showing up so uh I want to say good morning because we're on the E I'm on Steve and I are on the East Coast but um I know we're we have an international audience so good day to everyone um Welcome to our author talk with uh Dr step pores also known I'll say Steve some some breath as Steve welcome Steve thank you Jerry good to see you uh today good to see you as well today we're talking about uh Steve's new book uh poly vehicle perspectives um um uh and I'm going to let Steve explain what I just said wrong in that in that introduction about Steve's new book but um maybe we should start with that Steve welcome well okay first first we're GNA show the book Jerry beautiful okay okay so we're going the first point first of all welcome it's good to see actually several familiar faces I mean I'm going to have to do these things with larger screens so I can see people more uh and connect a little better anyway the book called poly vagal perspectives has a the title is very meaningful to me uh the theory came out in a publication in 1995 which was my presidential address to the to the society for psychophysiological research by around 2005 there was discussion about doing a special issue uh focusing on poly vagal theory for biological psychology and that issue was edited by John Allen who is a professor or was a professor at the University of Arizona and what I wanted to do he wanted me to write literally a paper focusing on poly Veo Theory literally an update so it was like a decade later where where is it and what I wanted to do in the paper was to basically say that uh the theory was more than a theory it was a way it was a perspective it was a way of looking at life looking at Human Relationships looking at looking at how we interact with the world and so I that was really the goal of that paper and I've kept that notion and and use that term poly vagal perspective in in many papers but that paper was published and really uh I believe it's the most frequently downloaded paper in in the history of biological psychology uh so it it got a lot of lot of hits a lot of reads and I like the title and so when Norton contacted me and asked me if I would kind of put together another book of readings uh basically uh explaining or telling people where the theory has gone I grabbed that title now what I also did was put in the appendix of this book an abbreviated portion or part of that paper so people could see where I was interestingly it's really quite clunky the the the paper from 2007 because I'm just kind of like stretching out and asking questions and throwing out hypotheses but what's happened in literally the almost the 20 years from that paper to today so we're at the end of 2024 and that paper is really uh let's say uh mid uh 2000s and that was there was a total uh expression of the theory in different areas and so what I wanted to do was to in a way displace the initial book that came out in 2011 with a newer book that would serve serve the same purpose which is literally a a resource or one could say an archive of where a user or a reader or a a person interested in polyal theory would go to get information but I wanted to do more than that I wanted to show the diversity of application and I wanted also I wanted the book to convey a little bit of who I was so I included some blogs some interviews and so I was trying to spread out the notion of what the theory was and also applications like there's a uh an article in the Harvard Business Review uh there there basically a whole array including a couple book forwards where the polyal theory is now used to reframe ERS danow syndrome autism and other issues so people could see or get a sense of what I was doing with this with these ideas and to think of polyal theory not as a uh let's say a locked in theory but as a scaffolding upon which one takes the scaffolding and builds whatever building they want to build move it to whatever area whether it's human or social justice or whether it's education or the work environment so I was basically this is my turn to try to put things together the the other in a sense uh focus of the book was not really the diversity because you know I've been around for as a as an academic writing papers since the late 1960s so there are a lot of decades and a lot of papers and so the decision was is this going to be a historical Journey or is this going to be a reframing of the theory from basically this contemporary period and the book focuses on virtually all the papers there are a couple that aren't uh uh from the uh 2020 so they're really very contemporary and they were basically selected for very specific reasons and the book is organized in in a very I would say uh a strategic foundational way so the first part of the book is really more focused on Theory and so those papers are in a sense denser and they're heavier to read and go through but by the time you get to the end you're dealing now with blogs and interviews where it's all over the place we're talking about everything but let's go to the theory the first part of the book which I consider the foundations or in my own mind pillars of what polyal theory is about and there are four four papers which become these four chapters one is a chapter uh which is the vagal Paradox which goes into deep levels of the physiology and it also kind of gives you a physiological basis to understand uh what the theory is its applications and even to be be uh prepared to deal with people who don't understand the theory who make uh misstatements Mis misrepresentations so that's a physiological neurophysiological Science Foundation then there's a paper on what I call the uh it's called a polyal theory of biobehavioral Journey to sociality and it's really to emphasize what is one of the main uh teachings from polyal Theory and that is we're a social species and we really have this biological imperative to connect and to co-regulate in fact our society is based on trust and co-regulation and connection and then the third chapter is really polyal Theory a science of safety and this is really to change our thinking about feelings of safety from kind of this optional thing to understanding it as an obligatory State our body needs so that we can be who we are we can be we can Express the creativity The Compassion the benevolence the generosity of what it is to be a human being and the fourth chapter was an interesting uh paper well they're all I can't say the others aren't interesting but the fourth chapter really was this kind of challenge uh to give it because I was asked to give this keynote at a transdisciplinary conference and when we start thinking about what is the theory the theory is transdisciplinary it crosses disciplines and because it crosses disciplines it literally I kind of view it as solving a rubrics cube because what you're looking at is the surfaces and those are the different Sciences or different disciplines but underneath those surfaces is a common core and if you kind of twist the sides appropriately you get at that core and what my work has been doing literally has been twisting the sides to get at that Common Core and that's really what I when in writing that I realized that I cross these disciplines and in that paper I go back to a quote of from a book that I read when I was a a senior in college uh when I took a course that was dealing with uh it was really the com the interphase between sociology and physics so it was like in a way we can say that polyal theory is this you know take the hard basic science is even the quantitative aspects of neurophysiology and then the psychological feelings the visceral feelings and then the behaviors so polyal theory has all these surfaces that make it transdisciplinary but what I was referring to the paper I read as a in college was a book called uh I think it was called Two Worlds by CP snow who was a English philosopher it's a small book some of you may have read it you I don't know if it's part of the literature anymore but basically it was saying that we have the Sciences in one place and we have the Arts and Humanity someplace else and there's this amazing Gap in between it and unless we bridge that Gap we're going to be in trouble and what I basically and in fact if we look at education today we know where that Gap is going it's getting larger and larger as Humanities and the Arts are minimized in undergraduate education when people are now more product oriented professionally oriented and literally vocationally oriented that they're no longer allowing themselves to be quote educated or philosophically educated and even the concept of being a liberal arts or when I was an undergrad was liberal arts and science and everyone had to take some Humanities had to take some science and it created a Common Language of let's say a more generalized or general generally educated person but what what I learned uh from a very good friend of mine who was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Indiana uh I learned from him that by the let's say 2015 by then only about 15% of undergraduates were getting their degrees in Liberal Arts and Sciences they were really gravitating to professional degrees and it's wor I would say worse it's it's fewer now we don't want to put values on it but it has an impact because what it's really saying is limiting the information that people have to develop their perspective of the world so I wanted to really emphasize that polyal theory is a it has many facets and what I wanted to do with this book was to literally show the reader the this my journey through this and what I was trying to do with it was to basically give a core that is foundational and then let it Blossom outward and let people understand that the theory is there for them to use it is SC holding and for them to be creative so thank you so that's a preamble okay I I did a quick Google search I think um uh CP snow the two cultures and the Scientific Revolution does that sound from that's it was it 1956 or something like that 1959 and I will not say that I've read it but maybe I will um but after after I read the polyal perspectives book of course yeah um thank you uh there's a lot there uh and you kind of got into the uh into the purpose of it towards the end but if you were to succinctly say who should read this book uh and what would they what would the reader get out of this um with with all these different perspectives um who who who did you have in mind when you were when you were putting this together well look when we put our stuff our stuff together who do we have in mind so we have multiple uh uh goals one goal is a type of archive so where would a person go if they were interested not just in learning more about the science of the theory but also its applications where would they go what what's out there you have many CL clinicians using poly vagal theory in the title of their books it's an expanding bookshelf but it's an application of a theory but if you want to get more information of the foundation where do you go you go to the primary sources uh you go to Google Scholar you start reading papers or can you get a volume that kind of gives you a sampling and this or a sampling by the person who created the theory so that you know that there's a sense of validity that if the person says that this is the theory you may not agree with the theory but you know at least that he said it and that's what the book the book is in a way for this broad growing uh poly vagal informed Community it's a reference book it it's not it's not a book you read for on vacation although I'm sure some people will I was always shocked that they read the other books uh other than the book with Seth Seth's book is a book for reading but the other books were really trying to create a resource for this uh emorphis expanding Community to give them information thank you I know that as a lay person uh uh I've learned so much out of reading and also attending these these talks as well with you and and colleagues about polyal theory in general and it's really kind of uh Chang my perspective on on life and challenges and such such as that so thank you from me to you uh but I know many of us uh have similar experiences with with uh with uh learning about the nervous system and how that affects our daily life so when we're reading this book is there anything that you keep in mind or you would recommend that we would uh use so this a very interesting question because when I published the first book I guess it's 2011 and I was in a sense mildly embarrassed about publishing it because it wasn't a really integrated book it was a book of my papers and you know it was very dense because it start off with you know the polyal theory paper which is certainly not not an evening read um I was shocked that people even bought the book uh but I was also shocked that the when people would come up to me at meetings they would ask me to sign the book and the book had all these uh postums in it all these uh ear Mark know the pages turned the book was like getting really thick and I was just totally shocked but then I started to understand something and that was I wanted to give them a guide to read it and that's what you were really asking me the guide I was telling them is the papers in the front of the book are heavy they're very science but as you go further in the back in that first book it's clinical applications so maybe you want to read the book from the backwards forward uh this book has some of the same features but it's so you really have a set of theoretical papers you have a set of clinical application papers and then you have uh papers really that are shorter papers that are targeted to different clinical groups and then blogs and interviews so it does start expanding into a more let's say to the vernacular of our culture thank you um I know that uh compassion is a is a big uh part of what you're talking about in uh uh uh I would assume that proba big poal perspectives would talk about compassion and and how do we be compassionate in a world right now that's a little kind of upside down in many ways but and not lose lose track of humanity and how can we be compassionate to each other uh through our nervous systems spe specifically okay so we're going to kind of like step back and and kind of refine the problem so we we're saying we need to be compassionate but why do we need to be compassionate because people's biobehavioral states are shifted into defense and therefore they're not witnessing they're not listening they're not co-regulating they're not interacting so the real problem is not compassion the real problem is the biobehavioral state that they are are locked into and locked into for a very adaptive survival related uh reason and that's where we get into polyal Theory we get into this understanding that physiological State uh basically is a major determinant of our experience in the world but not just our experience the experience of others who are interacting with us so we were talking about uh uh basically therapists who are in in war zones and I was telling you about how my interactions with them what I learned was that you really can't talk to a therapist in a war zone as if that person is unaffected by being in the war zone so you start understanding that their bodies are under states of fear and they're angry so but if they're in that biobehavioral state of defense they're broadcasting that to their clients so what I start doing in my talks with them was to say look you're totally justified in having these feelings this is what like you know you're under threat this is what your body does but when your body moves into that state you better be aware of it because you can't be a effective therapist when you're locked into that state so you have to develop a strategy to co-regulate with another or other trusted individuals whether that means going for a walk or reducing your clinical load and remember when people people are in these zones of threat and danger they feel that their obligation is to do more clinical work to help people and I was really trying to get them to understand that doesn't work that way because if they're locked into a state of threat they can't do their work they are broadcasting signals of threat to their clients and their clients are just not going to do well so we have to in a sense step back in a different way and in a sense they may think they're acting through compassion their body is is broadcasting that they are not in the state to be compassionate they're in a state in which they are projecting signals of threat so the simple part of this J is that we need to basically learn more about how to signal the nervous system to literally give up defenses and that's really what I can in my mind see as the real goal of polyal theory is one to be aware of that to understand the mechanisms and two to understand the algorithm that our nervous system is looking for to give up its defenses thank you for that uh Steve so I'm gon to ask a question that may not be scientifically uh acceptable but it's something that always comes to my mind uh and I think I know some of the answer to this but what you just described about uh a person trying to help another person through uh psychology or therapy or using the nervous system cues of danger and safety uh Steve would you say that um our bodies are able to receive information on an energy level or uh or are we picking up cues from micro expressions and uh and uh procity of voice and such things or does it all roll into one one big thing okay B I would say it's basically all the same a lot of people talk about a field or they talk about their intuition but we can deconstruct that with polyal Theory and say well you're having neuroception what are the features that your nervous system is using to detect signals of threat now we might not know all of them and that's really where we get into this vagueness of saying the person is carrying bad energy well if I were to see the person carrying bad energy and someone said to whispered in my ear and say okay Steve deconstruct what's going on I would look at their face which would be flat the intonation of their voice their presence their posture so I would find a lot of signals that would be unambiguous to the nervous system and so what people are doing is that they are responding to another neuroception but they don't know what the signals are and I see that as quote this energy and I I think what poly vagal Theory gives us is an alternative way of operationalizing that bad energy that fits more closely with I would say contemporary science science and health thank you uh Steve uh when we're in a state uh you you talked about States of uh well emergency States I guess uh in warri zones and such but um even for us people that are are privileged enough to live in a world where our danger is not so present but we still might be in certain states are there things we can do as humans that can self-regulate or move us to a different state um Dance Movement music sematic or C regulation what sorts of things would you would well you're you're dealing with a lot of them now so you're really moving into my current goal in life my current goal in life is to make the transmission of these signals of safety scalable and less dependent upon intentional Behavior so even the way you phrased it is like are there things that someone can do or someone can do for you you know so it becomes this operational mechanical uh if it's broken this is how you fix it and the reality is that we're a self-organizing self-repairing system and we need to have the signal to our nervous system that it's okay to repair because you can't repair if you're fighting and I even that in that paper that I mentioned about transdisciplinary I use the star the Starship Enterprise as the model because if you're putting up your energy Shields you're utilizing your energy resources and you can't do certain things and this is exactly what happens with Humanity when we create our energy whatever we want to call our defenses we interfere with our healing with our sociality with all the what I would call these generalized homeostatic processes which include interacting with others we are not a solitary type of species we are a species that evolve to co-regulate with and I I I use this very broadly with another appropriate mammal because when you're injured greatly injured by your interactions with humans the interaction with a dog or a horse or a cat may be the portal that enables your nervous system to give up its defenses Steve how important is a coration with uh I know that we both have cats and and uh what does a does another mammal that we think uh uh is loving towards us maybe they're not but they they pretend to be but how important some Co co-regulation with a loved pet or this this is this is in a sense trust I see I would always like to replace the word love with trust because we can operationalize trust and I think our society gets confused with the word love because many people think they love individuals but they don't trust them and so the benefits of that love are not very useful because they're getting triggered all the time but so when we talk about mammals let's say your cat or my cat or people's dogs or horses there's a great degree of trust that you see that is it's symmetrical you trust the animal and the animal trusts you and that enables both of you to give up your defenses and the part that I find really interesting with the cat is that cats have some quote playful behaviors that humans react to as if they're aggressive but they're just being a cat and we have to I make this statement because it's kind of interesting because my cat likes to mouth or nip a little but not to break skin and this is part of if you watch kittens or cats play that's part of their their uh portfolio of behaviors but it's not acceptable to me because it's going to break skin or potentially could break skin and I'm trying to some animals are easily trainable others I think you need to just put gloves on and Rough and Tumble with them so the issue is that you have to understand the behavioral repertoire of the other and we are as a so when we do the co-regulation with another pet we have to know what it is to be a normal dog or to be a normal cat I think cats to me now I had cats when I was young and then when we had cats when we had kids and then we got dogs and so there's like a 20 or 30e period we didn't have cats and in that period of time polyal Theory start to be developed and now I see cats in a very very different way I see them as extremely interesting co-regulators in which they are using you to regulate their state while we want our children and our dogs to regulate us so there's a difference so when you watch a cat we say the cat may be faking this maybe doing that but when you watch the cat the cat is basically there's one agenda and that is for that cat to feel safe and comfortable so the cat will come in proximity when the cat wants to be touched cat allows itself to be touched gives permission when the cat is overwhelmed with being touched the cat withdraws but the withdrawal seldom is out of visual sight the cat likes to keep you in proximity so the cat is using you to reduce any type of uncertainty in that cat's uh frame of the world and we have to understand that this is a brilliant strategy and why people don't I say let's say some people are not cat lovers because they see this as literally selfishness they superimpose the human B but what they're really saying is I want the cat to come up to me when I'm not feeling good and to comfort me and I start to make these phrases that if we treated our spouses and our children more like cats life might be a lot better in a sense we feel a violation of expectancy or a violation in reciprocity so the reciprocity if you're a cat is different than the reciprocity if you're a dog or a human that's entire book in itself Steve um uh I know there's a chapter on the sensitive patient through the poly through the lens of polyal um uh that brings some interest to mean it kind of relates to what you were just talking about could would you speak about are there challenges with working with sensitive patients uh using polyal Theory or or their benefits well I think the great benefit is really the explanation that many of the hypers sensitivities are basically reflecting a body that's in a state of threat and that's a very clear polyal principle and that state of threat can create inflammation just as well as it can create behavioral withdrawal or behavioral aggressiveness so what the functional medicine the application of polyal theory and functional medicine is basically saying there is an explanation of these defensive systems whether we're talking about inflammatory defense or autonomic defenses it it makes sense that the body is doing what it evolved to do and now so we now just need to Signal the body that it doesn't need to do that anymore that is this more uh complex texture or what we're calling a biobehavioral state so now inflammation is just part of a defense portfolio and if you come into do it from functional medicine you say well maybe there's a sensitivity and we can find uh a blood or we do this blood test and then we can titrate medication or treatment prob Theory says you might but also if you can the nervous system to give up its defenses of threat maybe the body will self-organize and heal itself the the part with functional medicine Jerry is that uh the word functional disorder is the it's the evolvement of illness that doesn't have a identifiable pathophysiology and this really means that many of the diseases or dis disorders within Internal Medicine are not confirmed with biopsies or other forms of let's say blood test and that is because many of the disorders are neural functional disorders and that is the big gap in medicine there are very few indices that are able to monitor the dynamic neural regulation of the end organ the organ itself self the measure that's most prevalently used is heart rate variability because heart rate variability is actually documenting the dynamic regulation of the heart through through neural connections and there's a little bit I would say also in gastroenterology there's something called electr gastrograph which study the rhythmicity of the gut and that Maps into gut disorders that The rhythms get disrupted there's some general rules that rhythms are part of our homeostatic system their feedback loops and under any form of challenge these rhythms get depressed they get depressed because it's metabolically cost to uh service them and when we're under threat our resources just like in Star Trek are out to our defense shields so we're in a sense diverting our metabolic resources to defend and not to heal and if we saw it that way polyal Theory fits very nicely into the model of functional medicine saying that these are really neurophysiological disorders that are potentially reversible Steve we have a lot of uh people responding to the subject in the chat which we won't have I I should say that we're not going to be able to take questions uh from from our attendees today uh live but um I wanted to just point out that I think Stephanie's here that uh Stephanie if you could put a link for the for the the app for communication um of these subjects we can uh follow up there as well but uh Steve what you were just speaking about with uh uh functional medicine and uh conditions and such uh there's a lot of research happening for long Co and pots and uh s such uh I don't know if we call them uh diseases yet but um what you're talking about uh is there a place for polyal Theory and application in these sorts of neurobiological very very much I actually just wrote an invited paper for neurogastroenterology and motility uh interesting it's really this new emerging discipline in gastroenterology that basically respects the nervous system and in that paper I go through literally the history of medicine and Medicine started off in terms of this uh strategy called NOS olog no o o l o g y which was really symptom clusters the idea was that if you're a good Observer you create symptom clusters symptom clusters Define diseases and then diseases will have will have a pathophysiological substrate and then we move this forward into the 20 20th and the 21st century and it not only will have a neurophysiological or pathophysiological substrate it will have a genetic underpinning now that's really great uh in terms of a model if it were correct the issue is more than 50% of many of the so-called clusters don't have a neurophysiological or pathophysiological basis and they get put aside called medically unexplained symptoms or functional disorders and they often the patients are often feel that they're being abused because the internal medicine the Physicians say to them you need to see a psychiatrist or a psychologist because it's all mental it's not real it's neural and the issue is neural is real it neuro is neurophysiological shifts and it's a perspective and without the tools without the metrics the Physicians are helpless and so they're fitting the diagnosis and the treatment within their own models which is symptoms assas biopsies genes and it it works for many it doesn't work for all it doesn't work for a lot and so we use the term psychosomatic illness which was saying it's psychologically caused when in reality you don't know you don't know what's happened uh yes and uh Steve what what is your opinion on uh the healers the doctors nurses is there a place for uh polyal I'm going to say in for but poly vagal theory on U how a doctor will walk into a room to heal a person well this is really I would say one of the uh embedded agendas uh for the poly vagal Institute was really to change the delivery of medicine at least that was mine and to in the long term change the training of Physicians I mean it's it's it's a global it's a very big question but the point was to really acknowledge that the context in which you deal with uh healthc care impacts on the client on the patient so if you treat the patient like a piece of meat they're not going to feel safe or welcome uh if they feel like they're they're stealing their your time it's just not going to work so all levels of interaction require a sense of co-regulation awareness sensitivity to the other literally it requires a I now we can move into the word compassion and the ability to witness I think as a society we don't do a good job witnessing others I think in medicine there there was a long history of the power of a physician as a witness uh and and the power of healing by basically people believing that they would be healed and what they're really saying is if I believe I'm going to be healed I will downregulate some of the defense systems and many of the symptoms of my illness are being driven by a body being locked into states of threat or defense so it doesn't mean that a Sao effect uh it's a real effect of co-regulation and Medicine needs to be get very serious about the context I want to bring up one point this goes back over 20 years ago I interviewed uh for a major administrative position at the national insuites of health and I was in this interview with the Director of National insuits of health and I said to him we know too much about literally human physiology to allow medicine to be practiced the way it is and and basically he was a radiologist he didn't have a clue of what I was saying and so we started to understand the disconnect between these hallowed Halls of research and medicine and the ability of being a human I had another interaction during that interview with the a person who was head of one of the institutes and he was uh basically a dermatologist and I basically was saying to him that it's very the skin is a major sensory system that impacts on how we react to the world so in sense communicates signals of safety and threat and he said I don't think it it matters very much this is what he told me the sensory part of skin he was basically interested in the tissue itself not in the way that the tissue was this sense organ affecting information that we were processing and changing biobehavioral state so it's not that people uh are antagonis IC to ideas it's just that their orientations are not inclusive of these uh very important Alternatives or possibilities do you find that your research and uh uh uh researchers that you're working with or have worked with are making a Headway into changing that Dynamic of the the you know the official medical world yeah yeah uh but I going to say pragmatically uh my time is ending you know it's like uh I I I if we go back to let's say early 80s I I had this really optimism that all you need to do was to show these things show the neural regulation and it relationship to survival or to illness that it would be embraced as measuring that intervening variable which is really part of a polyval theory which says our physiological state is that intervening variable between stimulus and response between cause and effect so medicine needs to have a better understanding of that physiological state but so does education and so does the workplace that if our physiology is in a more homeostatic safe State then we have the potential to be much more creative productive and literally nicer thank you um uh it kind of brings to mind that uh looking at the the uh the outline of of Po polyal perspective book that you've intentionally brought people in or or different ideas and I don't want to dwell on the fact that you uh you just said that you know your time's coming end because I don't believe that but um uh it feels like you're pulling PE more and more people in which you've always done but uh what is the future of polyal theory and how will you help uh guide what's so so part of the question is a good question part of it is kind of an inference uh the question really is you you basically bring people who who share principles who are creative who are explorers Pioneers uh you give them a scaffolding and see what kind of mountains they can climb and that's all I'm doing I don't want to own what they do I want them to generate so the part of this is that there uh it's easier let me basically my goal is not to be too much in in the act action because then it becomes me and not them and they need to be identified they need to be nurtured they need to get all the benefits of being creative individuals and it's kind of an interesting World we're in where there is always placement of hierarchies and we want polya as a principle says okay I basically tell you what the principles were that I had developed for what I call Trans translational research and that was proximity and parody those were the two principles that I thought the research needed needed that the notion that it didn't matter what your degree was in it didn't matter uh but it What mattered was whether you were in prox whether you interacted proximity so Laboratories uh needed to get out of their hierarchy of they needed to be more welcoming to people and they needed to develop this interactive one now of course the pandemic shift this whole shifted this whole aspect of proximity uh so many labs and many organizations have become virtually totally they have virtually become virtual so and something is lost it's not that I don't mind seeing you Jerry on Zoom but I certainly would rather sit down have a beer with you in person um so there and if we use this term field or energy or presence whatever want to use and we flip it into neuroception it's the ability to see signals in three dimensions versus two and it's not really three it's really four you're moving in time so I'm getting a different communication and this is what our bodies evolve to respond to uh it doesn't mean that seeing you on a two-dimensional screen is not good but it's not as good uh I I I would love to have a beer with you next time we see each other as well thank you uh um may we shift over into some leadership uh there's a lot of of the world that really needs yeah I G to say good leaders and uh there's a lot of uh World Dynamic that leadership could be better how does theory and pole perspectives address leadership and and what we can do to to improve things well I think again this is where longevity pays off where you start seeing things differently through your own eyes as you mature I if I go back to myself as a young assistant professor I had I had answers and I had kind of ways that I would do things and I thought that was how you you you did things and what I've learned over the years is the power of witnessing and listening to the other and so when we start talking about in fact I put this into play when I became chairman of a department and I realized that when you were given this responsibility to chair a department it wasn't being given a kingship it was I mean you could treat it that way you could take the resources and you could manipulate people if you wanted to but really what it was was given a type of responsibility in which your true responsibility was to listen to your constituency now you could never please everyone that was not the goal but you could listen to everyone and I think that's all most people wanted they wanted to be heard now they wanted to be heard and they wanted someone to make a decision but decisions did not need to be consensus decisions and I think leadership has to take that into mind that what people really want is to be acknowledged and leadership in a way is a model of family so actually we have people in P veel Institute who are actually focus on family but in a sense leadership takes on a hierarchical feature that is very much like a family and I keep thinking of departments and colleges and my life as an academic and also my life being disappointed in being an academic in terms which was really on the leadership domain and that is people not listening people not having core values but what poly veel uh can do as a theoretical perspective is to give people uh make people understand that they need to listen and listening does not mean uh doing certain things it means acknowledging that the other person has a voice and we see this all around the world and we see this even in our elections it's not that everyone expects their vote to be the vote uh that is followed uh that they'll uh but they want want to make sure that their perspective is respective respected thank you uh I know that safety is a core value of of polyal theory and and uh pretty much everything that's being taught and and uh especially in therapy would you say that safety can it be defined uh clinically or scientifically or is it more of a personal definition and if if it is a personal definition how do we find safety uh ourselves surrounding okay so this goes to that third chapter in the book which is political theory of Science of safety and interestingly this is a paper that was published in an Open Access Journal called Frontiers and it was published in I believe 2022 which is just a couple years ago it's already been cited in over 220 peer-reviewed papers within a two-year period less than a two-year period it's a that makes it kind of a hot item and what that paper is doing it's saying that uh feeling safe is not a subjective feeling it's a visceral State the you have the opportunity to feel safe if and only if your body is in a state that supports homesthetic function and all we have to do is look to the the vast number of poly vagal informed therapists and they are telling you that the autonomic states of their clients are disregulated and therefore the biobehavioral states that they can regulate in are very compromised so feeling safe is an option only that can only occur when our body is not in the state of defense and so it can be objectively measured and the goal of that paper was to Move It from that subjective feeling that had vagueness and uh was optional to something that was literally obligatory in our own Survival that are in a sense that if we're not feeling safe in our body meaning our homeostatic processes are not functioning to support Health growth and restoration we are not merely mentally uh challenged we are also going to be physically uh physiologically challenged and again our clinical colleagues tell us that look when people are in these states when they suffer from severe trauma or uh excessive uh stress or or chronic pain it's not isol their psychological phenomena is not oblique or unrelated to their physiology they have many symptoms that are very predictable like gut problems and again if you're poly vagal informed and people have gut problems you say well that's dorsal vagal defense what does that tell you it tells you that that body has in a sense experienced life threat and hasn't resolved it um for my brain uh I'm actually a little curious right now I think I know the answer again on this but I would love to hear what your thoughts are uh our states that that you've uh kind of uh clarified uh in the theory um is it okay to be in all the states and or is it actually healthy to to to navigate through all of the states of being in other words is it healthy to be activated um or is it unhealthy to always be in a calm State okay obviously you'll know intuitively the answer flexibility uh resilience is the answer and it's like I I actually wrote this U unusual book called conversations with Shiva a bio theology which they never published for a good reason uh but it's all about uh the concept of the Garden of Eden being talked uh being written from the perspective of polyal theory and that is in the Garden of Eden everything's taken care for you you're a Sit you're like a reptile you're a sit and weight eater that comes by you eat and you have immortality now there are a couple things that are very important in the human narrative and that is uh motivation uh the ability to acquire the ability to develop the and the ability to experience change and Novelty we like novelty and in fact what we learn of course from individuals who are neurode divergent or even those who have an adversary history is that novelty is too challenging for them that but in a sense the flexible person craves novelty this is part of what it is to be in a sense physiologically safe and to have homeostatic functions because the novelty triggers that homeostatic system it can create that withdrawal that you're talking about but when it when you finish the task there's a recovery cycle so the real issue is flexibility and resilience thank you uh uh I think we would you mind talking a little bit more about neuro diversity autism and um and uh how polyal Theory can can be applied to people that I'm actually working on this right now so I was going to mention the uh acoustic technology that I'm developing or have developed with Anthony gory it's now being called uh San oio s o n o cea uh basically it's a technology that augments uh music with bi endogenous biological rhythms to Signal the body so it's a technology that is designed to Signal the body to move into different biobehavioral states so if we step back and say what is the world that we want to be helpful in and that is the world we want to be helpful with is to enable people to regulate their biobehavioral states this does not necessarily mean you always want to be calm or sleeping you want to be organized and motivated and engaged and literally integrated so flipping into neurod Divergent which is really a platform in where we see these States play out so difficulty in sleeping difficulty in regulating one's gut are common with the neurod Divergent population but the other one is difficulty in calming and relaxing and the one that gets kind of like forgotten is difficulty organizing to be curious and mobilized in a social setting so we are targeting different uh basically creating different compositions which will have music and the synthetic technology to shift biobehavioral States into sleep relaxation and organized behavior and we're actually create it's going to be a suite of of Music composed with this technology with the targeted biobehavioral States and the product will hopefully will have it within 6 months for the neurode Divergent community so so the the way I want you to think about it is uh okay for for for many of us adults we can get really wrapped up or wired or perhaps even kind of uncomfortable or angry and we would like to calm down and of course the history of humanity was well there's alcohol and there's other substances um or or in I would say the 20th century and 21st it was well I'll just exercise and of course from a polygo perspective is exercising going to be calming to your nervous system not exactly uh hopefully what you want is the rebound from exercise to take over and calm you so you basically feed the fight flight system with the expectation that you'll have a rebound that would comfort you not the most efficient or effective way of getting calm so what I want to do is create a tool that people when they listen to it the body knows what the signals mean and uh we're we're having actually in terms of like sleep and calming really good effect with it so uh I I just think the future is not okay I was thinking of these things as literally stealth uh stealth tools with the but you don't they're not instructed the body knows what to do with it and basically create this uh portfolio of to tools that enable people to shift states without in s getting angry at themselves or angry at people around them so they go and they sit and listen um and I hope to have this ready so the goal is scalability uh the tools themselves the initial tool is actually a clinical tool that will be uh released in within 6 months by unite it's called rest and restore but the clinical tool is like safe and sound protocol it's a neural exercise so it is meaning that the goal is to build resilience but the goal is also not to use it as a standalone therapy but as an adjunctive therapy with other forms of psychotherapy so that when you experience these biobehavioral states then you have a therapist that can kind of walk you through and discuss it with it so the future in my view is refinement for what I'm doing anyway my view is creating a toolkit that signals the nervous system to move into biobehavioral different biobehavioral states and to provide either a user manual or clinical uh support model that will enable people to be more develop greater resilience uh just a quick question on that uh uh are you calling that neurom modulation or is that uh this something that's slightly different no you could call it neuromodulation because what we're doing with the uh acoustic stimulation is signaling the nervous system to regulate the visceral organs so that is neuromodulation the only difference is that we're not putting electrode on the body we're using acoustic signal thank you Steve uh we have about two and a half minutes left for the official time uh so I want to be mindful of that a quick question uh you spoke about heart rate variability variability uh earlier you know my watch my Apple watch gives me a HRV reading is that something I could be using um yeah the okay the pro yes and with caution so it the issue is heart rate variability from any wearable is a descriptive statistic of the variations of beatto beat sequences this includes arhythmia and false detections so you can get high heart rate variability just by having arhythmia and you don't want that to be who you are uh my strategy and this goes for 50 years plus in in in developing more refined metrics of components of heart rate variability and I was developing a very refined index of the respiratory rhythm in heart rate variability which was an accurate index of the ventral vehicle circuit that to me is more related but it's not in the wearables but the bottom line is yes higher is in general better assuming you're not prone to a rhythmus thank you um so I just wanted to U bring you back to um to the book poal perspectives and see if what what do you want us as the reader of this book what do you want us to really take away from it or keep in mind as we're reading this book is there something that you can really narrow narrow narrow down yeah well I want everyone who reads it to feel that there's a place for them in poly vagal Theory to use it to to be creative to apply it basically to to to use it um and to be expressive with it so for me what I really have enjoyed is really how the clinical Community especially the world of trauma has embraced it and it's not really the therapists many of the people who have experienced trauma continue to write to me on a daily basis about how it reframed their understanding of themselves and that was the first step in their own Journey of healing and I think in a sense what the theory enables us to understand is who we are and when we understand who we are we get less angry at ourselves and we start to learn how to manage ourselves better Steve thank you so much I'm just going to put a slide up uh very uh this is the book poal perspectives you can find it uh at our pvi bookstore uh you can scan in there uh go to poly vle in to.org um uh and it's also elsewhere as well um so Steve thank you so much um hopefully we can do more of these for all of your many years ahead of more and maybe I'll take a backseat roll but yeah I look forward to the many years in the future and watching the whole Community grow and looking forward to the creativity that brings forward thank you Jerry it's been really wonderful thank you and with that I I will stop the recording and uh thank you everyone that's that's uh attended today I I know this was a uh uh a discussion and not a question and answer but we have those available in our courses on polyal institute.org that Steve has some courses and every once in a while we have uh I think quarterly we have people come on Steve and de Dana sometimes to answer questions and answers so I invite you to go to pval.org uh Shameless plug there look at the courses there um resour there a lot of the papers you spoke about um and uh yeah have have fun so thank you so much thank you