Frequently asked questions.

 General Questions

  • You live life in a completely new normal without any ongoing effort or maintenance. Here are some specific examples:

    Persistent Access to Inner Peace: Even in moments of difficulty, there’s persistent access to the felt sense of peace/okayness/stillness. Here’s a metaphor to describe what this is like: right now, take a moment to notice the sense of smell. Literally notice what smells are present. Now, how hard was that? It just took a moment to orient your attention towards what was always accessible. Like the sense of smell, the felt sense of peace becomes increasingly easy to access as you move through the six phases of the shifting journey. By the time you complete phase 6, it’s more like the following example: take a moment to notice existence/awareness. Each and every mode of perception (thoughts, sight, sounds, smell, touch, etc.) you could possibly be experiencing now is completely filled and permeated by this sense of existence, as though existence itself is the pixels making up the screen of your conscious awareness. Once you’ve completed your shifting journey, every mode of perception feels completely permeated by this sense of peace. Are you always explicitly aware of the fact that you’re existing? Probably not. But the moment you look for it, you realize it’s everywhere and everything. That’s how total and unlimited the felt sense of peace becomes.

    Massive Reduction in Reactivity and Fear: A huge percentage of situations that previously triggered you fall away, to the point that it starts to become challenging to remember what those situations were in the first place. Instead, you move through life intuitively with far less fear, reactivity and anxiety.

    On-Demand Bliss and Spaciousness: The temporary experiences of bliss/fullness/heaviness and emptiness/spaciousness/lightness that are commonly experienced throughout the shifting journey become available to access anytime. For me, I spend a lot of my days relaxing into this state of bliss that resembles a mild dose of MDMA, where the surface of my skin feels buzzy and warm. It’s lovely and always accessible.

    Naturally Unfolding Self-Improvement: the need/urge/compulsion to improve one’s self dissolves, and one simultaneously feels perfectly adequate as they are while it’s easier to embrace the growth and healing opportunities that life presents next.

    A New Relationship with Thoughts and No-Toughts: By the end of the shifting journey, it becomes easy to let thoughts drop away for extended periods whenever you want. I used to have to meditate for around an hour to have a hope of maybe 30 seconds without thoughts. Now, that’s available so easily that it’s not extraordinary anymore.

    • One of the things people love most after their first session is how quiet their mental activity is. For the first time in a long time, or maybe ever, they get an extended taste of what it’s like to move through life without much of a mental overlay. But a few hours after the session, mental activity typically comes back online. By the time you complete Phase 6 of the shifting journey, you can let thoughts drop away and have other modes of perception (sights, sounds, bodily sensations, etc.) fill up your awareness instead.

    • Before my first shift, I, and I assume most other humans, had a very contentious relationship with thoughts. Think a good thought, and you feel better. But careful! If you think a bad thought, you'll feel bad! So tenuous, always walking/thinking on eggshells. After my shifting journey, my system's relationship with thoughts is completely different. 99% of the time, thoughts are experienced on equal footing with other modes of perception (sights, smells, bodily sensations, etc.) rather than being the supreme, all-powerful mode of perception. This makes it much easier to let thoughts drop away for a little while, in the same way you can simply close your eyes and not have to solve any visual puzzles to enjoy a break (in the same way thoughts will essentially communicate that you have to solve their riddle with more thoughts before moving on -- brilliant, really). 1% of the time though, a thought pertaining to unresolved trauma can carry more weight and power over my system. Just this week, I was shocked to fall deeply into a shame-loop of thoughts and related emotions for a few hours. It was jarring, way off my normal baseline, but useful in pointing me towards where more healing is waiting.

    Persistent Flow States: it’s normal to end your day with the sense that it was an absolutely perfect day, moving through each moment from a place of whatever intuitively feels like should be happening next. It also becomes the default to mono-task, to focus for extended periods on the one thing that matters most now, instead of multitasking and jumping around different tasks.

    Routine Therapy Sessions Mirror Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: Your bodymind system lives in such a deep state of safety and openness that it substantially easier to get to the root of whatever it is you’re working on in a therapeutic setting. I tell my practitioners to “assume I’m always on psychedelics in our sessions” and that such deep levels of healing are possible. One client shared that before their shifting journey, they could have never spoken some of the deeper truths they felt about their father. Another client recently shared that even though now’s not the time for them to pursue more therapy, for the first time they know exactly what the deeper issues are that they’d want to work on.

    Greater Sense of Connection: Interactions with animals, strangers, children, and nature become deeply enjoyable, easeful and energizing.

    Instant, Deep Relaxation: Moments of pausing to do absolutely nothing are deeply enjoyable and rejuvenating.

    Healthier Habits Naturally Arise: It’s common for people to have less of a desire for alcohol, sweets, drugs, and scrolling the internet mindlessly in order to feel better, because you’re already feeling better all the time. While these methods to temporarily boost your sense of wellbeing used to work for you, you’ll probably discover that they have an immediate, negative impact on your sense of wellbeing. This makes it easier to break habits, since the time-delay feedback loop of regret becomes quite instant!

  • Your bodymind system is designed to not only live in a state of peace, connection, rest and digest (which the shifting sessions help you gain more and more access to), it’s also designed to move through states of fight and flight, to feel the full spectrum of human emotion, and to embody a range of roles in various situations.  

    Like all humans, you’ve probably lived your entire life without full access to fight or flight, certain emotions, and specific roles. You’ve probably stuck to what’s safe, which was a limited set of those options. And if you’ve had a lot of trauma, that option set might be tragically limited and fragile.

    Once your shifting journey is complete, you are in an optimal state to claim access to this full range of what you can experience, all from a place of safety and intuition.

    I plan to release more content on the website to help you get the most out of your post-shifting journey. To be transparent: I’m currently experimenting with lots of practices and approaches to support my continued development in this direction. It all currently feels off-piste, and once a framework arises that’s worth sharing with you, I’ll get to work! Stay tuned!

  • Because it deserves to be.

  • Absolutely! It’s fun and useful to compare and contrast your experiences with others, especially your answers to the reflection questions posed at the end of each session. Sometimes you’ll hear someone mention something that helps you discover something true about your experience you hadn’t noticed before.

During Shifting Sessions…

  • You’re not alone: this is a normal thing to experience. In the sessions, you’re relaxing your body beyond where it normally believes it’s safe to do so, so it’s perfectly normal for there to be some fear and for your body to communicate “uhoh, if we relax further we might not be safe, so let me spice things up with some agitation!”

    One client reported that as they’re getting deep into the session, their mind would generate scary imagery about their family members as a way to try to pull him out of the experience, but he’d gently let the images go without engaging with them directly, and he’d proceed along with the session just fine.

    Be gentle with yourself around this, and I promise that your system, perhaps after one or two more sessions, will realize it’s actually safe to relax that deeply, and will allow you to proceed.

    Another thing that might be happening for you is that you might be feeling more of the anxiety or fear that was in your body prior to the session, now that your mind has settled enough for you to feel these bodily sensations.

    When you notice this anxiety or fear and its associated bodily sensations (heightened or heavier heart rate, constriction in the chest or gut or throat, etc.), just follow my guidance in the session: you can fully let those sensations be there without any direct engagement with them as you continue to root yourself into the experience of the relaxing qualities that are present. Then, automatically, those bodily sensations usually go away after a little while without any effort.

    Again: be gentle, be patient. You’re on the right track.

  • Don’t worry! You’re in good company. This happens to lots of people. Here’s some guidance:

    1. If you're tired before starting a session, don't proceed with this session now. Take a well-earned nap instead! You deserve it!

    2. If you do happen to doze off for a moment mid-session, that's totally fine. My next set of instructions will wake you up and help you pick up where you left off. But if you ever need to, you can rewind the video and continue from there.

    3. Sometimes clients start their sessions without realizing how tired their bodies actually are. When we spend so much of our days in the mind, awareness of our body's energy levels can be pushed out of conscious awareness. Therefore, if you start falling asleep mid-session, it could be a sign that your system is feeling safe enough to allow you to experience the tiredness that might have already been there.

    4. Sleepiness can also be a brilliant defense pattern if the body is afraid of relaxing more than it's comfortable with. If this is true for you, then my suspicion is that this pattern might be present in other parts of your life (e.g. suddenly feeling fatigued in moments of anxiety, uncertainty, etc.). If your body is shutting you down in this way, then probably after one or two more sessions, it will feel safe enough to let you proceed fully awake. Maybe it just needs a little more time to get comfortable with all of this :)

  • Yup! This is commonly experienced. One client’s Whoop wearable device always registered our shifting sessions as sleep, even though she was actually awake!

  • Ha, yeah. Amazing, right? That’s what it’s like to feel 100% safe and secure, all from the inside-out.

  • This happens to for some folks. If that’s there, then just feel these emotions and let them be felt and expressed as fully as is available. There’s no need to analyze or understand them. And if you want to get mad at me, then have at it!

  • This is common. Whenever you notice this happening, gently let go of the image and return to the instructions in the session. The mind, concerned about how deeply you’re relaxing, might want to step in and entice you with some interesting imagery as a way of maintaining control. It’s a perfectly normal thing for the mind to do, and you can just gently let it go, even if you have to do so many times.

After Shifting Sessions…

  • Yes, this appears to be how the body integrates each shift: there's an initial burst of bliss/peace/spaceyness/thickness/lightness/high-ness/etc. that can last a few hours. It can feel awesome, like you're on psychedelics. Then, these sensations subside and things feel "normal" again as your system integrates it. However! You've actually entered into a new normal, which can feel just as normal as before even though it's actually quite different. Some of the first clients to experience guided shifting reported that they feel the same as before and wonder if they've "lost it," even though the responses they would offer to the post-shift reflection questions were completely different answers than before!

    Once you finish Phase 6, it becomes easy to kind of toggle on-demand on a variety of blissful qualities that had previously only showed up immediately post-session. For me, I have pretty easy and regular access to what feels like a mild MDMA experience of warm, buzzing qualities that permeate the front side of my body: it’s more subtle than the post-shift high, but it's lovely and a nice place to hang out throughout the day. You also can hang out in more spacious/empty qualities, and they too are pretty subtle and enjoyable.

    I have a few recommendations for you:

    1. Be open to your bodymind system's experience with the shifts. Everyone's system experiences these changes a bit differently. While the patterns typically line up with what’s described in the research, that's not always the case. There's no right or wrong way for your system to experience these changes, no better or worse version.

    2. Complete the reflection forms, especially the Full Reflection Forms, in the days after each shift. The Full Reflection Form guides you through a detailed reflection of how your system's access to different nervous system states is evolving. A lot of the embodied changes that follow each shift will show up in these areas, and they can be easy to miss if you don't intentionally reflect on them.

    3. Play with the reconnection meditations. These will help make it progressively easier to reconnect with the relaxing qualities in the sessions throughout your day. While reconnecting with these qualities isn’t quite the same high as the immediate post-shift experience, it still feels great.

    4. Review your answers to the reflection questions from the end of each shifting session in the days/weeks after each session. See how your current experience compares. There might be more similarities than you'd think.

  • Yup! This is extremely common to experience right after a session and typically lasts a few hours before the body integrates it. Enjoy it, and be gentle with yourself. Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel safe.

  • This is normal, and it usually passes within in a few days. It’s common for people to feel tired when a session is finishing, but if the fatigue persists for more than 24hrs, here are some possible explanations:

    1. The shifting sessions can help you feel more of the fatigue that’s actually been there in the body but below conscious awareness. This seems to be especially true for my go-go-go always-positive clients, but can also be true for others who are hard-working, self-sacrificing, or generally anxious.

    2. There are sometimes multi-day “seasons” of low energy and high energy that the body seems to naturally go through, and the shifts might be connecting you to that. Sometimes there can be a somewhat obvious reason for that (eg shutting down a higher energy response that the mind is afraid of) or sometimes there’s no discernible reason at all and it eventually levels out to a normal energy level. Similarly, I’ll sometimes experience little seasons of high energy that come and go, too. 

    3. Fatigue may also be signaling something that doesn’t feel right to you. Here’s an example: during my shifting journey, I had set a deadline to complete a big task and send off an email to a community. I pushed hard to complete the task within the deadline I set for myself, but I immediately collapsed and felt exhausted afterwards. Upon reflection, I discovered that my mind set this arbitrary deadline from a place of anxiety, and what was motivating my actions were adrenaline rather than being in an intuitive flow state. With hindsight, I can say that I absolutely did not need to complete that task, let alone complete it by that deadline, and my body knew that and was trying to communicate that with me. As I progressed further into the shifting journey, it became easier to receive these signals from my body in real-time rather than just after the fact. A lot of the activity in your life may have previously been motivated by fear/anxiety and executed with adrenaline or under a state of mild duress, and your shifting sessions may be revealing this to you on a felt-basis. Your body knows, and now you can start to listen to it.

    4. Fatigue might be shutting down the experience or expression of an emotion that your system is too afraid of feeling (e.g. anger, fear, shame, vulnerability). The Full Reflection Form is a good place to start developing some awareness of this, and I hope to add more exercises and sessions to the website to help with this process.

  • This is very common. I invite you to start paying attention to your dreams, especially the vivid ones where a strong emotional or fight/flight response is being activated in the body. While I’m not an expert on working with dreams, I’ve noticed in my experience that upon completing the shifting journey, my vivid dreams help point out the next areas of growth and healing that my system wants to move towards next.

  • This is very common, especially for emotions that we’ve repressed for a long time. I, for example, have repressed anger my whole life. Midway through the shifting journey, I had a conversation with someone that made me deeply angry for a few days, and it shocked me. It became obvious shortly thereafter that the anger arising was not fresh anger, but was predominantly old, unexpressed anger, hence its disproportionate response. You might experience something similar: when given an opening, your long-represses emotions might finally feel safe to start coming out. Fantastic! It’s super healthy for the body to do this. Be gentle with yourself, trust what’s arising in your body, and be skillful with your expression of emotion. And when you make mistakes, repair.

    Sometimes, people feel waves of emotions or energy rolling through their body without a clear cause or story connected to them. Don’t fret: this is also super healthy. Find a safe, quiet space where you can let this all move through your body, even if that involves shaking, moving, shouting, or trembling. This is the body releasing trauma from its system. But if you ever want more support for this, then find a great therapist or psychologist to support you.  

Across Shifting Sessions…

  • While each phase’s webpage includes some instructions for how many sessions or shifts are needed before moving to the next one, there’s no risk to you if you move on to the next phase later or sooner than specified. The core guidance method across the shifting sessions is nearly identical, with two exceptions: (1) starting in Phase 3, you gain the option of a slightly faster guidance that takes you through 3 shifts in an hour instead of 2, and (2) the guidance method in Phase 6 is slightly different, and might not feel fully intuitive or accessible until you’ve completed Phase 5. I’ve budgeted in an extra session here and there throughout the journey, ensuring you’ll be ready for Phase 6 once you reach it. The only other thing that changes from phase to phase are the reflection questions I have you investigate at the end of your shifting session. There’s always the chance that you’re being asked a few questions that aren’t relevant to where you’re at in the journey, which is totally fine and harmless.

  • You’re more than welcome to experiment with more sessions more frequently if your body feels up for it. I’m not aware of any specific issues with shifting too many times, too close to one another, though it is common for people to experience the post-shift high for a few hours before their body stabilizes and integrates it. I've also observed that after 3 shifts in one session (which becomes available as an option starting in Phase 3), people are usually pretty tired, and if you feel tired, then please honor your body’s needs. The other observation is that a small number of clients sometimes feel great for 24ish hours after their first 1-2 shifts in Phase 1, and then repressed trauma starts trying to move through their system, which can be met with some resistance.

    Trust your intuition and listen to your body. If you decide to experiment with this faster pace, please let me know how it goes for you.

  • Yes. This is a standard experience for people. The shifting process itself, along with how it feels immediately afterwards, can vary from session to session. Just be open to the process and attentive to however your system is responding.

  • Yes, that’s perfectly okay. For me, the qualities I connected with at the start and end of the session, along with how it felt to lower down through them, felt similar in every single session. However, once I’d stabilize in the new qualities, the way I felt would often feel unique or different, as though the same method, done multiple times, generates different types of results.

    There are no right or wrong qualities to connect with. Simple notice whatever is showing up at each step of the guidance, letting go of the mind’s impulse to judge or doubt.

  • No, not necessarily: the empty/flat experience that is commonly experienced is just one stop along this path. Often, the experience of flatness or stillness felt after one shift will transition to an experience of richness or fullness after the next one.

    Interestingly, lots of different experiences show up along the way!

    If you’re currently experiencing that flatness/emptiness, then I invite you to experiment and play with it. What becomes easier to do, experience or express without the familiar rollercoaster of emotions in your life? Where is courage easily accessible? Where can you boldly and simply speak your truth with kindness?

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