You Can’t “Think” Your Way Out of Long Covid or ME/CFS | Irene Lyon, MSc
I’ve seen people who have been bedridden, unable to move, unable to digest food, on liquid diets, histamine, mass cell, you know, over the top, all the immune markers through the roof. And I know them now and they’re thriving and healthy and completely better. Completely better. They’re not managing. They’re really better. So, we can’t reset our nervous system because we’re not laptops. But when struggling with conditions like ME/CFS or long COVID, it can feel like your whole system is crashed. And when doctors are out of ideas, you start to wonder like what is actually going to help. If you’re tuning in here for the first time, I’m Rayan Agel, and this channel brings you the lived wisdom and the latest science that point the way to recovery from ME/CFS, long co, and more. And today I am so excited to welcome Irene Lion over in Vancouver, Canada. She is a nervous system expert and one of the most respected voices in the field. Irene has a gift for making complex information easy for all of us to understand and apply. And she’s also walked the talk, turning her own recovery and health journey into a global mission, supporting over 25,000 people so far, in counting in over 90 countries to heal chronic symptoms by working with the nervous system and beyond. So in this conversation, Irene shares, you know, how her understanding of healing has changed completely from pushing harder to learning how the body itself learns and why true recovery means going beyond the coping tools to re-educate the nervous system, go deeper, integrate medicine and movement, and how to do it wisely, and build real strength and safety from the inside out. Before we start this video, I have a small favor to ask you. The percentage of viewers who subscribe, keeps dropping, and the bigger the channel gets, as you’ve seen, the bigger the guests get. So, if you haven’t already subscribed, I ask you to consider doing so. Thank you and enjoy this episode. Irene, so exciting to have you here. Thank you for doing this. No problem, Ryland. It’s good to finally meet you. I know this took a couple tries to get us on, but here we are. We are. And then we had some difficulties today that were entirely my fault as well. So, you’ve been very patient with everything. Thank you so much. Ah, okay. So, so many great things to dive into in this conversation, you know, practical things, insights to help people who are navigating their journeys. But I know that like many people who now work professionally supporting others, you’ve had a personal journey with this as well with your health that you know impacted, you know, the way you approach the work you’re doing now and I understand there were a couple really like gamechanging moments and insights that completely changed your understanding of health and healing despite your, you know, vast professional background. So, um I’m sure um many people who follow you are aware of this, but some of my subscribers might not be. So, could you tell us a bit about that? Yeah. Well, there’s a couple stories. I would say the um the the one that really catapulted me into alternative healing, if we want to call it that, was I had some pretty bad orthopedic injuries in my younger years when I was a late teenager and in my 20s. And to keep that story short, cuz it’s quite long, um regular physical therapy, massage, it it just wasn’t enough. I had had a a patella fracture. Um a cruciate tear on one of my knees. Another cruciate tear on my other knee. I was a ski racer big into sports. And um I was doing everything ran like that they told me to do. And I was strong and I was fit but I was in a lot of pain. And what I didn’t know at the time and this was 2000 2000 so 25 years ago which is nuts. Um, I needed to rewire how I moved. I I was a I was aware kinesesthetically, but there was so much tension in my body because of the accidents, the injuries. So, um, this is what led me into learning the Feldon Christ method, which is not really, in my opinion, as well as it should be, uh, because it’s so powerful of a method, um, and a way of relearning how to be in your body, but it completely changed my life. Um, my body that was once in pain and tightness four weeks later and I really committed to doing this work was completely different. Everything was light and easy. I could move freely and it was a real like, holy cow, I need to learn this. So, fast forward to 07, I then was trained to be a Felon Christ teacher, a practitioner. Um and bearing in mind at this point I had already had two degrees in uh we call it kinesiology here in Canada which is exercise science in the states. Um I have have a research degree in biomedical science, health science. I did research with human subjects at a university. So I have the whole gamut of science and pathophysiology and all of this. Um and this really opened my eyes to this other way. The cool thing was Dr. Feldon Christ was also a scientist. He was keen on how the body worked, how the mind work works. But he was ahead of his time, right? So the stuff that he was doing with his patients or his he called them students in the ‘ 50s, ’60s, ‘7s, and even in the 40s was unheard of back then. Like he was recovering people from stroke and paralysis and all these things. So that was like a huge initiation and then I started practicing that work in conjunction with fitness and loved it. But then this is where the world of trauma and the nervous system came in. I was working with clients doing Feld and Christ work with them. They were very committed and for whatever reason the stuff that helped me wasn’t helping them. And so I was like I’m missing another piece. And I was still really young at the time. So I had in some ways all the time in the world to keep going down these paths. That led me to the work of Peter Lavine, which led me to the work of some of his prodigies. And that led me to understand chronic illness, mental illness, autoimmune, all the things that you talk about and teach um in your world. And while I at the time wasn’t struggling with any of those chronic symptoms or syndromes, um the people that I was working with, they were interestingly enough as I started to do this work in my mid30s and I mean I’m I’m turning 50 soon, so it’s been 15 years in the trauma world, Peter Lavine world, we call it the new traumatology world, I unearthed all this stuff that I had no idea I was holding in my system from my accidents, from my early childhood, and a whole bunch of other things that we don’t have to dive into right now. So, I was kind of lucky in that I started working with my nervous system before I had a classic chronic illness or an autoimmune illness. I can almost guarantee that if I hadn’t have got into this work in my early 30s and really, if I’m more honest, my early 40s, I probably would be in this moment bedridden, chronic pain, every, you know, diagnosis under the sun. I’m pretty certain I would be because as I’ve gone through this healing journey with the nervous system and getting into um we would call it the fluid traumas that I had. We can talk about that if you want. I’ve kind of released these things peace meal, but when I really look at them, I’m like this would have been diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis. This would have been diagnosed as lupus. this would have been diagnosed as a neurodeenerative condition of you know and it just was really interesting for me to recently look at this and go oh yeah if it wasn’t for getting into this early when I did I would be in a completely different state in my mid years. So that’s a short story of 20s to 30s to 40s and now going into my 50s still working on stuff you know I’m not I’m not you know home free of all these things but I have a very different lens of how I feel symptoms work with my body um I don’t kill it the way that I used to in my 20s with you know harsh therapies and that kind of thing. So it’s it’s an interesting it’s been an interesting path. It’s always so fascinating for me to meet health care professionals like yourself who through their own personal journeys discovered or you know exposed gaps in the conventional medical system and the health care system in the way that we are approaching things. And then from that um it’s unfortunate that you have to then go and seek out your own answers. But then the incredible silver lining of that is now all the people that you work with benefit from all that you’ve learned because of the all that you’ve been through. I imagine you’ve seen and helped a ton of people as a result of what your journey has forced you essentially to learn. For sure. I think too, you know, the part that I like to highlight cuz right now there’s sort of this strange polarization where people, you know, don’t listen to any of those people or but do listen to these people. like all this stuff that’s occurred over the last sort of six years or so. And I mean, if it wasn’t for medicine and say surgery, I wouldn’t be able to walk. I would probably have an amputation of my leg cuz my knee was so damaged. I have science degrees. Um, I’m very proud of them. And it was because of the understanding of anatomy and physiology and pathophysiology that I was able to go as far as I could in the mind body practices like Feld and Christ and in um the trauma healing somatic elements because we’re still working with the physiology and I see colleagues who don’t have that training in physiology and anatomy and understanding things like cardio output and how blood pressure works. works like they do struggle a little bit more because it’s not baked in their system from theory training. And so I’ve been really thinking about this cuz I see a lot of people just pissing on on science and biology and it’s like no there’s some good stuff there. Now would I prescribe pharmaceuticals for every single pain that a person has? Absolutely not. But if I break my leg, you know, knock on wood, I’m going to want that that morphine probably to take away the pain, right? So, I think there’s this element of and like we need to look at all of the pieces and the best teachers I’ve had have had so much experience. They’re not just steeped in one methodology. Just like medicine, I always use this comparison. It’s one of my favorite ones. Medicine isn’t just one thing. It’s all these different fields of study, understanding things from very different angles. And right now in the somatic trauma healing world, people are really in their camps. And in order to really work with our bodies, from my experience, you need mult multiple methodologies. So I I kind of like to see myself as a general practitioner of the healing somatic arts and sciences just like a good good old-fashioned general practitioner doctor who understands all the systems and also brings in stress reduction and nutrition and exercise. They’re great. That that would be a great GP, you know, that old school, you know, little town GP that really does help people. Did it all. Yeah. you know. So, yeah, that’s sort of I’m really been thinking about that recently. I have as well and I’m glad that you brought it up because many people completely discard the conventional medical system. I did myself after years of feeling like they couldn’t help me because in reality in those moments for those specific things they didn’t have the information I was looking for. So then I just completely wrote them off for everything. And then I realized that I was unnecessarily suff suffering with issues in my body that they could have quickly remedied. So I’m really working to and I that’s why I’m glad you brought this up to put out that message like you your doctor probably doesn’t have all the answers, but they have some. So it’s important to keep working with them because you’re only just going to hurt yourself if you close yourself off to all all of the science that we have. Incredible science and advancements in medicine. Yeah. But I do know that you’ve argued just overall that you’re seeing that the wellness industry is collapsing. So I’d love to hear, you know, what are you seeing that’s making you think this? And what do you think needs to happen to shift that? Is that even possible? I hope it is. Yeah. I mean, uh, back in, uh, 2016, I wrote an article that got a lot of bad commentary. Um, it was about how I was seeing that the the mindfulness at that time, the mindfulness industry, I think I stated, is going to burst. It’s a bubble that’s about to burst. And I compared it to the the financial crisis of 2008, right? And how that bubble burst bursted in the mortgage uh industries and it it collapsed the worldwide economy. And I don’t know what made me think of that. I think I was watching the movie The Big Short. That’s what it was. And I remember watching that movie going, “Wow, we’re in that right now with this explosion of mindfulness and meditation, which are all very important.” Right? I’ve done countless interviews with a very good friend who was a priest and then went into meditation, lived, you know, in a monastery monastic life and we really dive into what is meditation, what is higher consciousness learning. It’s very important. But if you are living in a state of survival stress with a ton of stored trauma, a lot of those meditative practices, and I’m being very general here, um, for the sake of this, they’re, from what I see, it’s a person trying to force themselves to not have thoughts. They’re not in their body. They’re not really in a meditative state. It’s a it’s a willpowered structure for a lot of folks when they do what they think is mindbody work and because of my work in fitness and then feld in Christ mind body um and then into the trauma worlds and early trauma worlds which is so important because preverbal trauma we don’t know it in our brain it’s in our tissues it’s in our physiology and so a lot of people are walking around doing what I would call coping and management practices and tools which are keeping them alive and are keeping them from you know beating their kids and putting food on the table you know which is important but under that there’s this other element of dysregulation if we call it that that needs to be addressed and if we think about medicine you know you can feed someone the best food in the world have the best water coming out of your taps the test natural light, all the good things. But if there is a low-level infection in a person because of malaria that they picked up when they were, let’s say, 12, that has to be addressed cuz that is creating havoc in the system. And so if we think of um this this mindfulness bubble that I’ve h I’ve seen bursted because recently we re we shared that article and it got a completely different commentary. Wow. because eight or so years had passed and people are now on the other side of that eight or so years going, “You’re right. I’m still not better with all this mindfulness work, with all this breath work, with all of this uh positive thinking work, positive psychology work. Um even hypnotherapy, which is a wonderful art and science. I have a really good friend who’s a hypnotherapist and I’ve done it myself. If you don’t know how to be with your internal sensations and the survival physiology, you can put your mind into a bypass, right? We would call it spiritual bypass. Um, I also would call it somatic bypass where you’re bypassing the body and you think that you’re better because your mind is more calm, but your internal system is still screaming bloody murder. Right. Yeah. So, I would say that is it collapsing? I don’t know. I think it needs to have a re a restructure and it needs a different direction. And as we mentioned previously, you know, there’s a time and a place for everything. And some people might need some mindbased work um before they get into nervous system work. Nervous system work to the level I teach it and do with my students is not a walk in the park. You know, you’re you’re asking someone to go to some of their deepest scariest terrors and fears and horrors in a titrated slow way. But when that stuff comes up, you’re seeing stuff that you blocked out of your not just your memory, but your body for some people decades, right? And so you have to prepare the system to be able to take up and sense and feel and process and in some cases taste the yucky stuff that got, you know, buried inside. And that’s the part that’s a little less sexy because it’s it’s a lot a lot. And it’s like you’re doing surgery with with yourself going into stuff that um you you hid for real good reason. So for people who are navigating the wellness space, the health care system right now, yeah, are there things that you see are going well and are really helpful and supportive of people and also are there still red flags that you’re seeing? So if someone watching or listening right now is, you know, like they’re in it, like you know, how do they navigate this? What should they be looking for? What’s working? What is Yeah. Yeah. to be careful of. Great loaded question there. And go. Well, what I’ll what I’ll I’ll I’ll answer this maybe in a couple parts. A lot of my senior students who are now training with me to become uh practitioners um came from the health coaching world. So, diet, energy work, even psychic work, um nutrition. And even they them who have all this training in nutrition and fitness and coaching health coaching they are stating if you don’t get into the nervous system and understand your nervous system at a deep level and not again I’ve I used them the comment a moment ago breath work. A lot of people think breath work is nervous system work. It’s not. It’s breath work. It’s it’s a therapeutic way of yes, if you have difficulty breathing with your lungs and you need to learn how to expand that volume, wonderful. But it’s not going to reset reset. I don’t like that word. It’s not going to rewire. It’s not going to regulate your nervous system. It might help calm it, but it’s not getting to the gremlins that are causing that. So, so all of these students that I have, you know, they’re kind of preaching the gospel, so to speak, of you’ve got to get into understanding your fight, flight, freeze, collapse patterns, which are driving for many people their insomnia, their health problems, their gut problems, their chronic fatigue. I would also say that again, some people aren’t ready to begin that. And so this is where a we would call it a titrated approach which is like small little steps. If you are working with someone in the wellness industry, a coach, a healer, a nutritionist, you want to make sure the changes that you put into the system are slow so that the system can integrate what’s happening. So that’s number one. I like that. The second thing that’s a bit more hot topic these days and you probably know this, the importance of circadian health and just the artificial aspects of our living environment, blue light, these computers, um you know, cell phones, radiation, being around electricity all the time, not being outside enough. that I think is very promising to me because a lot of those practices are just natural, right? It’s the way our ancestors, the way my grandparents were, you know, outside on the farm up with the sun asleep, you know, early eating based on what’s available in your area, you know, not eating pineapples in the winter if you live in Canada, those sorts of things. So that uh element of the wellness industry that’s increasing and it I think that’s good but I’ll also say people are getting a little fanatical around it too just like with anything right um so but I am I’m seeing positive things with that because it’s also connecting people back to the earth one thing that I’m seeing going maybe a little backwards um in the 80s and 90s fitness was huge right aerobics in the 80s uh strength training in the ‘9s all of the balance tools and core training and all that has a time and a place. But what I’ve seen as more people get into the nervous system work is they’re swinging away from highintensity uh exercise. I don’t know why, and I’m generalizing, but I think what’s occurring is people are are over self soothing and over resourcing into I just have to chill out. I’ve been type A my whole life. I’ve been pushing. I’ve been doing I’ve been overdoing it and now I’m going to go the other way and underdo it. Now, if someone is healing from chronic illness, then yes, you got to take it slow and you need to do little baby steps like walking for five minutes might even be too much for some people. But we also have to say because this is pretty conclusive research, you need to have high aerobic capacity. our our muscles, our bones need to be strong. We need to maintain that. We know through the research that uh healthy longevity requires fitness. Um you don’t have to be Arnold Schwarzenegger or anything like that, but you know, you need to maintain muscle mass and build it if anything. So, what I’m seeing is it’s like people are forgetting about that important thing, but we still need it. And so with my students in my training, you know, I’m very diligent at ensuring that they’re not dropping um the importance of physical fitness and physical activity as well. Um I think people are getting really into like dance, you know, ecstatic dance and movement and and intuitive movement and again those are great, but it’s not it’s not going to get your heart rate up and improve your cardiorespiratory capacity. So I hope that makes sense. It’s one thing that often people don’t talk about, but I see it getting missed. Yeah. In a lot of health coaching that’s very mindbased and very somatic based. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s interesting you bring that up because I just just recorded a video for my channel members and I always share a bit of an update for my life. Yeah. And I was nervous to talk about this because I’ve gotten into a space where I’m much more focused on my diet, on the nourishing foods that I eat, on how many how much strength training I do every week, on how much cardio I’m doing. And it I’m almost nervous to put it out there. And I’m saying this isn’t for if you’re in the middle of long co like this is not your focus. But as you come out of it and return to normal life, it does feel like it should be all about hanging out with the squirrels and doing meditation and like no like like I need muscle mass especially as I’m you know approaching 50 and you need exercise you need like all this stuff matters the physical stuff matters as well but I do or even if it feels like if it’s too much of a vigilant focus on it that that’s going to upset your nervous system like well it takes a little bit of vigilance and discipline to stay on top of all of this which was the reason I started talking about it cuz I’m like everyone seems a little bit lost as they come out of these conditions like what do I do now? I understand looking back that how I was living life before probably wasn’t the best way and that I needed to be a certain way as I recovered, but what do I do now that I’m feeling good again, you know? So, it’s Yeah, I 100% get it. That’s great that you were just talking about that because the other thing I think is humans in the past didn’t live as long as we’re now living um because we have clean water and a solid relatively solid food supply if you know how to buy the right food. And so we’re living longer and so because of hormonal changes and there’s this thought that as I get older I need to be more sedentary. It’s just this classic mindset, but and I’m sure you’ve followed accounts in the social media worlds of uh individuals in their 80s who look better and are more fit than they were in their 30s. Yeah. And the the body and there’s there’s solid um it’s called gerontology research. This was actually what my um masters was in. Like an elderly person can lift heavy weight. Now, you’re not going to say to that person, “Go lift a 100 pounds today without ever having learned how to do a squat, but it’s there in the system to do it.” Now, of course, orthopedic injury, and I know that too well, can hinder a person from doing some of these things, but there’s always adapt adaptations. Um, but yeah, I I you know, I it’s funny. I never I didn’t think I was going to share this today because but you led me down this interesting path, but it is this element of a lot of times if you get that physical vigor back, that vitality back because you need life force energy to increase your heart rate and lift and push weights, you actually improve the mental state. And we know this, you improve your your visual acuity because you have to be alert when you’re exercising. I also understand that some people can exercise and be completely clueless and not tuned in and you know but so if you treat movement, physical activity, fitness with a real kind of meditative quality where you’re really in it and feeling it and noticing your breath and feeling your heart rate, it can cross off a lot of the health care needs, you know, as opposed to, okay, I got to go do this and I got to do this and and then that might be the the the final thing I’ll say in the health care space to go back to your question is we tend to partition things like okay this day is for meditation or this time is for this practice you know I only do this in this state you know I wait till I have lots of space to do this or that and a real aware self-aware uh focused individual can be in a meditative nervous systembased state when you’re washing the dishes is when you’re doing laundry, when you’re driving your car, but we tend to think we need all this time. And to a certain degree, if you don’t know how to connect with yourself, practice is essential. And this is what I teach in my courses. But what I want my students to get to is they that they don’t need the practices. This ability to self-regulate, notice impulse, follow through with impulse occurs because they’re integrating that theory and that knowledge into all aspects, not just when they’re sitting quiet without, you know, kids screaming all around them, that kind of thing. Yeah. So, you know, this idea that we need a coach for all these different things, I think it’s a nice idea, but you also can’t sustain it. you know, you can’t you can’t meet x amount of people each week to keep you accountable in all these elements of health. And this is why I think people fall off the wagon. You know, they stop because the accountability isn’t coming from internal. It’s coming from an external source. It’s keeping them on track because they know they have to check in with that coach or that person. But it also, you know, I’m going to go a bit more macro. Our school system taught us that, right? Like if we went to normal public education, which I did, you don’t study it unless it’s on the test. You you don’t get interested in a topic unless you’re being graded on it. Um, and I think that’s another thing that’s really harming a lot of humans right now, at least in the West, is because of how we were taught how to learn. We don’t we typically don’t know how to find something because it’s internally interesting us. It’s of interest to us. And so, we don’t put time to something um because we haven’t been taught that. And then often what occurs and I’ve seen is people typically don’t look for help until they hit rock bottom, right? and then they’re interested and keen to learn as much as they can. Um, so this is sort of a trend I’ve seen and in my students, those who really show up and want to change the way they think and the way they relate to their learning and their human experience, those are the ones that have incredible shifts in their nervous system because we’re not just giving them a treatment plan or a management strategy. were rewriting how they connect with themselves in the world. And that started from conception essentially, you know. Yeah. And you can see how this is all understandably very overwhelming for people that face these conditions. Their health suddenly takes a nose dive. There’s so much information. They’re in 100% like I must rescue myself mode and they’re trying 19 different things. All the coaches like you mentioned. Yeah. Yeah, I’m just thinking like to sort of bring it down to a more practical or daily level of what this looks like. Like most of my viewers are facing conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, me, long COVID. They’re full of all of these symptoms, these scary symptoms that they’ve never had before. The symptoms are changing. They’re moving around. Some days they’re severe. Other days they’re more mild. They’re trying to figure out the connection to what’s causing them. and there doesn’t seem to be much until they get to this place where they’re just scared to do anything because everything they do or eat or think seems to make them feel worse. So, if they came to you and started working with you in this state, like where do you start like like how how do you simplify this and how do you do the nervous system work with people who are going through this? Yeah, I would say first off that those um individuals like those with living with those conditions that you just mentioned are probably the bulk of those that go through my programs when I was in private practice saw those those individuals and and so I’ll also say I’ve seen people who have been bedridden unable to move unable to digest food on liquid diets histamine mass cell you know overthe-top top all the immune markers through the roof and I know them now and they’re thriving and healthy and completely better. Completely better. There isn’t this they’re not managing they’re really better. Yeah. And so the first thing well the first thing is a person has to want to get better. I know that seems kind of you know trit but it’s true. Like there has to be a deep desire to get better cuz I have also seen some not get better because they’re attached to their diagnosis to the way their family, friends, and the world sees them. And this might trigger some folks and that’s okay, but like they know their life with this illness and to move away from that is scary. So yeah, it’s okay if it’s scary, but the question always is, do you really want to get better? If you do, wonderful. So then the next thing is education. No practices, no anything. Education. And the reason why um Ren is that we’re not living in a natural world. And so a big part of Peter Lavine’s discovery back in the late60s and it is the name of his seinal book waking the tiger um is that when we have a stressful event or a traumatic event or we’re living in this conditioned world that we’re in, we don’t release our survival stress. We store it inside. And so when the fight and the flight, but also the freeze is trapped in the system, inevitably the system can’t keep going and it collapses. We would call this to use a fancy jargony term, the high tone dorsal of the parasympathetic. So everybody thinks the parasympathetic is this beautiful rest digest thing and it is, but it’s also the thing that puts us into a chronic illness into shutdown. And so what’s occurring typically when you have uh the host of things that you mentioned or one of them you are living in a state of fight, flight, freeze and collapse. It’s like having the gas on and the brake on in a car at the same time. Eventually the engine’s just going to cop out and stop. So education is important because then we have to go well why is this person living in this state of survival stress fight freeze shutdown and typically there’s early stuff there’s early childhood trauma maybe in uterero trauma or it could just be the chronic stress of life it could be a big accident so one of the things that is very common um when folks get a more chronic illness diagnosis is they were living life pretty okay. Usually high achievers. I’m being general here. And then they have a car accident or they lose a family member or they have a divorce or they go to grad school. It’s really stressful. Something happens or child birth. This is one that I’m seeing more and more. The system was already maxed out with so much stored stuff and then this event comes in and everything just breaks apart. And so this is a common thing that I hear. And so the education is really important. Not just what I just said, but understanding why when the system is trapped in that, this is why the immune system stops working. This is why the gut stops working. This is why the blood pressure flips flops and how we would see say POTS or long COVID. Um, this is why the brain can’t think because it’s trying to figure out all of the trap survival stress that’s in the physical body. but also in the relationship of the environment. So if we grew up in an environment that was not safe and it doesn’t have to be like physical abuse, a lot of people think, “Oh, I didn’t have trauma.” If you have parents that are loving and give you everything you need, but they hate each other or you have parents that are emotionally just sort of tonedeaf and don’t relate to you, that’s a big stress on a little person’s system. And so over time we we shut down and we store this stuff. So a lot of the education is super important. And then from there the practices are vast. Um but some of the basic ones are learning how to reconnect to the environment, learning how to reconnect to what’s called the intraception. That is key. So when we have a lot of these physiological um symptoms, pain, burning, tightness, um those are just some that come to my head. You know, a heart rate that spikes, a heart rate that drops, we get afraid of what we’re feeling and then the fear makes it worse and then the symptoms don’t change and then we kind of stay in this trap cycle. of um not knowing what to do with these sensations and then that leads to emotional dysregulation because sensations drive emotion. And so this is a lot that I’m saying, but it comes down to better being able to be with that internal awareness in conjunction with the environment and knowing how to sense when things that are maybe real trapped trauma responses come up and out and then knowing how to get them out of the system. And how that happens is so individual. It could be tears. It could be anger. It could be processing really terrible images, memories. It could be movement that needs to come out that didn’t get to come out. Um, interestingly enough, Peter Lavine, who founded Somatic Experiencing, his first ever client that gave him the idea of waking the tiger, she came to him because of fibromyalgia, chronic pain, insomnia, like all the things that are so common today. But this was in the 60s and he traced it even though she was in grad school, very stressed, very competent woman. He calls her Nancy in his book. He traced her initial traumas down to a tonsil, a tonslectomy she had when she was a little girl where she was masked with ether to put her under and they had to hold her down. And this is a very common thing. Children get held down for medical procedures all the time, dentistry, vaccines, being put under, and they want to fight. But then the anesthetics comes over them, they go limp, they go into obviously a state of being unconscious, but that tiger that wants to fight and run is still in the system. And this is where one can improve diet, improve environment, improve relationships, improve mindset, even improve physical fitness. But if that little tiger or a lot of tigers are still stored in the system wanting to rage out and get out, um it’s just creating management in the system. And then this goes back to what I was mentioning with a lot of my students who are health coaches. They got into health coaching typically because they had their own illness. And then it wasn’t until they got into deep nervous system work through my world that they actually got out like fully out of their illness. Up until that point they were just coping and managing. Um so your question was what do people when they come what would I say or do with them? That’s a very kind of brief overview of what they would need to be interested in learning about. And then slowly, and by slow, I don’t mean like over 3 months. I mean over years, slowly rewiring and learning, relearning how to build up an actual solid regulated nervous system. And that’s what I teach. That’s incredible. Uh I love that you have all of this available for people. If people wanted to learn even more about this, I know you have a lot of free resources, some paid programs. So, what do you have available for people and where can they find this? I think one of the more comprehensive free trainings um is called the it’s just called healing trauma. It’s a three-part video series. It is older. I’m quite younger in in these videos, but it’s still it’s still is solid information. It’s multimedia and it’s video with visuals um me talking and then that free training um has one exercise like one basic neurosensory exercise so people can you know press play on that and be guided into some of these basics and then from there I have low fee classes I have larger programs I would say the one program that has brought people to the most level of full healing is called Smart Body, Smart Mind. Um, and this has been running for almost a decade now. So, I started in 201 12 with this stuff. Um, which was around the time that I was deep in my trauma trainings and still in private practice. So, it was being in private practice, Ryland, that made me realize, oh my goodness, it’s not enough to just work with someone one hour a week, right? It’s like it’s a false sense of hope that they think if they come see me once a week that there’s going to be this miraculous cure. And people got a little bit better, but they never got to the degree of better that I’ve seen testimony from students that I’ve never even met in person. It’s pretty incredible. And it’s because the curriculum teaches someone how to go at their own pace, how to learn the theory, how to apply the lessons to their body so that their system, we like to say, can become their own medicine. So yeah, there’s so much on my site that I will put this out there. People can sometimes get overwhelmed, so don’t be overwhelmed. If you’re not sure where to start, just email us and my team can, you know, always guide people in the right direction. And then of course I’m on all the socials and all that stuff. Incredible. Yes, you have an amazing YouTube channel and just so many great things. So we’ll make sure all of this is linked in the video description. So for people watching, listening, definitely take a moment to check that out. I’m also thinking I’m going to link a video here. It was an interview I did with Dr. Deepo Revenrron and he talks about some of the things you’re talking about about some of the the gaps in the conventional medical system, but how to work with them and you know do other things to to supplement that. I think that’s a really important um takeaway from all of this. Love the work that you’re doing. Thank you. So excited we finally got to connect. I’m sure that this is going to help a lot of people. I hope we reach even more people with all of the resources that you have available and just so much gratitude to you for the work that you do and for being here and talking with me today. Thank you so much. It was chat. You’re so welcome. Yeah. And thank you to everyone who’s watching and listening and I hope to see you in this next video with Dr. Deepak Revindrron. Thanks everyone.
In this video, Irene Lyon explains why so many “coping tools” fall short, how nervous system education changes everything, and what practical first steps look like when symptoms feel overwhelming.
CONNECT WITH IRENE LYON:
🌐 Irene Lyon’s Website – https://irenelyon.com/
👉 Smart Body, Smart Mind (nervous system re-education course) – https://smartbodysmartmind.com/
🏠 Irene Lyon’s YouTube Channel – https://www.youtube.com/@IreneLyon
ALSO MENTIONED:
📒 Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine – https://amzn.to/4nCJJyV
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 🤝 Meet Nervous System Expert Irene Lyon
03:11 🤔 Irene’s Own Health Journey
04:04 💡 The Method That Changed Her Life
10:39 🤝 Why We Still Need Conventional Science
13:18 🧘♀️ The “Mindfulness Bubble” Is Bursting
15:16 🛑 Coping Tools vs. True Healing
16:52 👻 Spiritual Bypass & Somatic Bypass
19:17 🧠 Breathwork Is Not Nervous System Work
20:48 ☀️ The Promise of Circadian Health
22:23 🏃♀️ Why People Are Afraid of Fitness
27:46 🧹 Finding Regulation in Daily Chores
29:16 🎓 How Our School System Taught Us Wrong
31:22 ❓ Where Do You Start With ME/CFS?
33:34 🐯 Waking the Tiger
36:17 💔 You Don’t Need “Big T” Trauma
40:58 📚 Free Resources To Start Today
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REMINDER: This is for information purposes only and nothing I share should be considered medical advice. Please make your own assessment, do your own further research, and consult your trusted healthcare professionals before deciding if anything I talk about here might be right for you.
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