Transcript of Episode 550: Liz Tenuto: The Somatic Exercises That Calm Your Nervous System in Under a Minute New

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it!

Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up. You guys, we have a great episode ahead. Well, you'll— I hope it's a great episode. I think that this is a really interesting topic. Um, I don't, you know, full disclosure, I don't know much about this topic, which is why I'm super interested and excited to have you on here. I've never had a somatic healer. Is that what you would call you? Her name though is amazing on socials. It's The Workout Witch, which is— I love that name. Thank you. Yeah, great to be here. Oh, thank you for being here. It's great to have you. Um, like, her name is Liz Tenuto. Her book is called When the Your Body Speaks and How Somatic Healing Sets You Free. So thank you for being here. Can you just tell us all, just in layman's terms, what is somatic healing? Like, what are— what is it? What are we dealing with here?

So soma is the Greek word for body. So somatic healing literally translates into body healing. What I teach are somatic exercises, which are really tiny micro movements that you can do in bed or on the floor or even like in your car waiting at a red light or on the plane that release stress out of your body, release tension out of your body, release trauma, and regulate your nervous system.

So is it like another modality? Like they say, like, you know, breathwork is a very popular one right now. Of course, meditation, things like that. Is somatic— is it— what is it? Would— is that what you call it? Somatic healing? Is that just another modality that really just helps, like you said, calm your nervous system and destress? Like—

Exactly.

Yeah. Okay.

It's just another modality. I would say it's more under the umbrella of therapy.

Yeah.

But it kind of spans therapy and wellness and therapy and even fitness. Therapy is considered like a top-down method, which means that it's more cognitive, mindset-based. And then somatic healing or somatic exercise is what I teach. Is bottom up. So you're really working from the body.

So don't you have to be— would someone have to be really in tuned with their body to have it even work for them? Or to— is it more like psychosomatic? Is it also psychosomatic? Because the reason why I'm asking is I've recently gone through like kind of a traumatic experience. And people were like, you should try somatic, you know, somatic healing. And it seems like such a— it seems so foreign to me that I couldn't even like, I couldn't even wrap my head around it. Right?

Yeah, like that seems woo-woo.

And that's me. I'm like the most— I'm the most unwoo-woo person you can ever meet.

Yeah.

So anything that seems or sounds woo-woo, it's like right away, like my guard goes up.

Yeah.

And, you know, I know that you do Reiki and you do what other stuff? Other—

other— Pilates.

Yeah.

Force Pilates. Yeah.

But this to me was, like I said, was really interesting because of— I have had friends who've who do it, who've done it. I've asked you about a couple of my, the friend I was talking about before, and they're obsessed with it. They think they get so much out of it.

Yeah.

Which is why I wanted you on here today.

Yeah. I had a really similar experience when I first started. I was actually invited to a somatics class by my dance teacher. I used to be in my early, early 20s. I was a ballet dancer and my dance teacher was like, oh, you're so dissociated all the time. And I knew I had PTSD at that time. And she was like, "Come to my somatics class." And I was— I had seen her class, and it was just people rolling around on the floor in their pajamas. And I was like, "I don't know what this is gonna do for me." I was so skeptical, but I was also desperate. I was in a lot of pain at that time. I had sleep issues. I had chronic pain, chronic anxiety, lots of dissociation. And so yeah, out of desperation, I tried it. And I cried in the bathroom after my first class because it felt so good, and I'd never felt that good in my body before.

So like, if you're just— so if you're a dissociated person, or if you were, how did you— how did you associate, or how did you even feel anything the first time? Because the whole idea of dissociation, or the idea of like being, you know, compartmentalized or whatever, like, it is that you cannot associate, right? That you cannot feel.

Yeah.

That in that, like, the mind-body connection.

Yeah. So, you know, when we think of the nervous system, you can think of it essentially as, like, the highway, the connection between your mind and body. And when you're dissociated, your nervous system is kind of in a freeze state or it's dysregulated. And what somatics is really good at is re-establishing that connection. So if you think about yoga, there's kind of like a right and wrong way to do the poses in Western yoga. And somatics is not like that at all. It's really about reconnecting you to your inner landscape and And, um, my teacher used to say like, your version is the right version of doing this exercise because the way that we cue people through the exercises really reconnects the mind and body and brings you back into that associative state.

Oh, so if it's very— can you give us an example actually? Yeah. Yeah. I think that'd be good. That'd be good because I can ask a million questions, but I think sometimes it's easier to learn when you have an example like that.

Yeah. So let's do one together and I'll talk through.

Okay, what do I do?

We're just gonna sit here. Oh, okay. We'll sit with our—

can I move this? Should I move this?

You don't really need to. We'll sit with our ankles hip distance apart. Yep. And then you're just going to take your finger and place it in between your eyebrows. Yeah. And you can have your other hand resting. Perfect. Anywhere is fine. Great. And then we're going to swipe up on our forehead. Once it gets to your hairline, you'll lift off and come back to your eyebrows. We'll just repeat that action over and over again. If at any point your arm gets tired, you can rest, put it down, and then pick it back up when you're ready.

So I'm just taking my finger, for those who are listening, from my eyebrow to my head, right?

Yep.

And then just, then taking my finger off.

Yep. And we'll do medium to firm pressure here. You can go a little harder than you think. Great. And as we do this, how relaxed can your jaw be? How soft can the hand that's resting on your leg be? Great. How relaxed can your stomach be? Excellent. Can you unclench the sphincter? Excellent. Imagine— be as lazy and unambitious as you do— as possible as you do this, as though you could drool as you do this. And we'll just do like one or two more. And at any point when you're ready, you can rest. And we'll just pause for a moment, see how you feel. That is a really quick exercise that instantly relaxes you. It actually calms your fight-flight response.

I could fall asleep right now.

Yeah, I know.

Oh my God. I should have waited till the end of the podcast. I know. I'm exhausted.

I should have told you that before we started. Wow.

I, I feel tired.

Yeah. Yeah. It immediately calms the fight-flight response.

Why?

It connects to a cranial nerve that connects down to the, to your brainstem, and that is where your fight-flight response gets activated.

So by just taking your index finger or any finger and just pushing and pressing up from your, between your eyebrows to the top of your head.

Mm-hmm.

That works.

Mm-hmm.

What, how much, how long does someone need to do that for?

What I teach is 5 to 10 minutes a day. So I have an app, I have courses, and I do 5 to 10 minutes a day of practice. But for example, on my way here, I was feeling a little tired. I had a late flight into LA last night. And so on my way here in the car, I did an exercise to stimulate my vagus nerve by pulling on my ears that gave me like an extra burst of energy. And I just did like a minute and felt immediately.

It works.

Yeah, it works really, really well. Um, we do that too. Yeah, you want to do it?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, mine as well, because now I'm gonna fall asleep on your interview. So yeah. Okay, great.

Are you wearing earrings?

Yeah.

Okay, so we'll just work around the earrings for now. We'll still have the ankles hip distance apart, and you're just going to use your hands and pull firmly down on your earlobes, and you're going to pull right Left, right, left. And you can have medium to firm pressure here. And we're gonna start to walk up the earlobes all the way up to the top of the ear. And we're just pulling right, left, right, left. And we'll walk down the earlobes. We're just gonna repeat that action several times. And it's almost like you're pulling them out. Yeah, exactly like that.

Mm-hmm.

And then as we do this, see if you can relax in the toes so your toes aren't clenched. Unclenching the eyebrows. Great. Seeing if you could drool as you do this movement as well.

Ed's looking at me like, what are you doing? This is the woo-woo girl. Oh my God. And then go ahead and rest. Okay. I still need a coffee. That didn't work as well. Yeah. And then— The first one worked.

The first one is very relaxing. This one, you'll feel a little surge of energy. It can take It can take, it can take, this one takes like maybe you'll feel brighter in your face.

See, I just drink my Magic Mines.

Yeah.

When I need, when I need, which by the way, we should do right now. See, to me, this is how I get my energy and my focus. But like, but I feel like, by the way, cheers. These are really good.

Cheers.

Have you had one before?

No, thank you. I'm excited to try it.

Oh yeah. This one has no caffeine. It's great for, for focus. So. Delicious. Have you ever had one?

No.

Oh my God, they're amazing. People love these things. I usually just down them, but the reason why I'm not— I've had like 4 today. I don't know how many I'm supposed to have. Um, maybe we can do like a— this with it, with the, uh, pulling of the ears.

Yeah.

How does that— like, so explain to me how that works. Like, number one, do you have all these modalities that you've been taught through, like you said, like a coach or somebody who just— is there like a book that says do this to feel that, and then it was practice, it just helps? Like, tell me how you became the person that does all this stuff. Like, you, you didn't, you didn't make up these things, did you?

Or some of the exercises that I teach, I created kind of knowing the principles of somatic exercises. For example, what we just did with the ears.

Yeah.

Utilizes a principle called bilateral stimulation, which is also found in EMDR. Therapy with your eye movements right to left.

I know that. Okay, so tell people who don't know what that is, because that's another, uh, therapy form of therapy that's supposed to be extremely effective.

It is really effective. It's another bottom-up therapy, meaning that you don't have to necessarily remember your trauma or even verbalize your trauma, and it still is a— it will still help you heal from trauma. It's great for people with PTSD and CPTSD.

What's it called? CP—

CPTSD is complex PTSD. So folks who experienced abuse during childhood or, or if people were in, like, a really abusive relationship, just, like, long-term trauma.

Oh, okay. Okay.

Is, is CBTSD. Essentially bilateral stimulation is done in EMDR, and I created some exercises that utilize bilateral stimulation, but just in a— with different body parts in a different way. But the majority of the exercises that I teach are exercises that people have been researching since, like, the 1970s. And under the somatics umbrella, there are several different schools of somatics. There's EFT tapping. There is— That was the one I was thinking of.

Yeah.

Body-mind centering. There's Feldenkrais. There's Alexander Technique. So there are all these different schools of thought. And I really discovered this and became good at it for my own healing from trauma. And then I was teaching— I would— certified in Pilates, and so I started kind of like introducing some of the somatic exercises into my clients' lessons. Most of them were healing from injury, and they were like, "Oh, we love this. Can we, you know, can we start and end the lesson with this?" And I just started teaching it more and more. And during COVID I really started posting it online, and people— people became people became— I thought it was going to be very niche, but now I have like 4.8 million followers across platforms.

That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so give me an exercise for sciatica.

Yeah, so you're gonna be moving the whole time. Um, so you would lay down on the floor.

Oh yeah, another one of these. Okay, the brain fog and the sciatica, the two good ones.

You would lay down on the floor and you would place your— actually have a free 21-minute class on YouTube.

For sciatica?

It's not for sciatica. It's just a full body relaxation class, but it will help your sciatica. But let me give you a specific— it'll like relieve the pain of sciatica. A specific sciatica exercise would be you're laying down on the floor. You have both of your knees bent. They're facing the ceiling, ankles hip distance apart, arms down by your side. You make a figure 4 position with your leg, which means that your right ankle is on the bottom of your left thigh. And then you would just take that whole shape and rock it a little bit to your left and come back. And it just is this really— and we would just, um, like, it looks more like the whole shape rocking like this. Yeah.

Oh, yep.

And you keep your shoulders relaxed on the floor. And it's a— you would just take it a little bit to the side and come back because you don't want to pull on the sciatic nerve. You don't want to experience any pain. But then if the small movement feels good, we could make it like 10, 10% bigger, 20% bigger. And we would just do that on both sides. If you tend to have more sciatica pain on one side than the other side, I would repeat the side that you experience more pain on one more time with you. And that's a great quick exercise.

I love that.

Yeah.

Okay. That's, I'm gonna try that. And then you do both sides, you said, right? Mm-hmm. How about our faces?

Yeah.

Because— and our hair. I see people who, when they're going through a lot of stress, they get much more gray hair and their face starts to get more age, like more wrinkles and fine lines. How do we stop that? And besides just taking a peptide and injecting it, what can we do other than that somatically?

Yeah.

To look our best.

Yeah. So with hair, for example, I was in marriage, and it was a really stressful, toxic marriage, and the guy was not good to me. And I was quite young, I was like in my early 30s, and I got like this huge gray streak in my hair while I was married. And then was doing somatics as I was getting out of the relationship, and then just got out of the relationship and my hair repigmented back to my natural color, which is brown. So stress That's essentially what stress—

How is that possible?

Yeah, stress, like extreme amounts of stress like that, it's all connected to your survival response. So when you're in fight, flight, freeze, your body diverts energy away from non-essential functions, like re— like pigmenting your hair, and it goes and it conserves its energy only for the most essential functions. So that's why you'll start to experience faster signs of aging. You'll start to experience more wrinkles. You'll start to experience the, um, the graying of your hair, or like bags under your eyes can be connected to lymphatic drainage too. There can be other things, but essentially stress accelerates aging because your body is diverting energy away from its natural repair systems and from its nonessential functions. Once you get your body out of its stress mode, out of its stress response, then your body's like, cool, we can divert energy back up to the stem cells that are pigmenting the hair. We can divert energy back to collagen production, for example, in your face.

But I've never seen people go from gray hair, like, because look at Obama, like he became totally gray after the, you know, being the president. His hair never went back to being the regular color. Or like people who age, right? Like, when you're 50 or 40, you don't have gray hair, but then when you're 60 or 70 or 80, you have gray hair. I don't see the fact that like, if that was the case, when you're retired and don't work and don't have any care, and half of Florida would be brunette and blonde without gray hair.

Yeah. So this goes up to a point. So once you turn 60, then that's when genetic aging starts to kick in and there's not much that you can do.

Right. So there's a difference between getting gray because of aging.

Premature. Yeah.

Or premature because of like chronic stress. Exactly.

Yeah. So if you're getting, grays and, you know, if you notice like, ooh, my hair is getting gray a lot faster, like, yeah. And you're also in a really stressful period of your life. That's very— and you're also under 60. Like, that's all very connected.

I mean, there are differences. I mean, sometimes it's genetics and like you're just— but like I will say though, like, of course, as every extenuating— there's different circumstances. But I will say for the most part, if you really think about it, people who are highly stressed, they do look older. Like even the fact, like You know, every mom I know, right? They age. If a mom I see at 40 who has 2 kids, 3 kids, and they're like, they're in it, look older than a 40-year-old who basically has no kids, who doesn't have that additional stress.

Yep.

And responsibility. There is a difference. You know, it's just what it is.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's really how you're how your body is processing, processing it, right?

So, so you're saying some of these exercises can actually help remove and release some of this stress.

And then your body's natural repair systems can kick back in. You get out of survival mode, it diverts energy back to the non-essential functions. Your body is self-healing. So really you just need to like give it this catalyst of getting it out of its stress response and it— the body does the rest of the work for you.

And so is there a particular— a particular exercise we can do to kind of look younger, like face-wise and bloating? I got a million. I— you're never leaving.

Yeah. So in terms of like your scalp, for example, and you can do exercises where you're moving your scalp or even like pulling on your hair. A little bit like this. So I'm just— for anyone who's listening, I'm just taking my right hand and I'm placing my fingers on my hair and I'm grabbing my hair close to the scalp. And then I'm just giving it a little tug. And you can just do that all over your head. And that brings blood flow back up to your scalp.

That's a good one.

Yeah.

And what does that do? Helps with—

it helps with gray, with natural repigmenting your hair back to its natural color.

Oh my God, that's such a good one.

Such a good one. Yeah. So I teach a bunch of scalp exercises. Faces as well. So maybe Obama will do them one day.

Yeah, I don't even know why, of all the people, I thought of him. The only president hasn't looked— hasn't looked a day older is Donald Trump, because, you know, because he already is. Yeah, well, also because he's not stressed. He doesn't give a shit. He's not stressed, right?

You know? Yeah.

Um, hold on, this is a really good one.

Yeah.

So can you go on the top or just the bottom?

Yeah, you can go on top. You can go all over, just pulling your own hair a little bit. And it brings blood flow back up to the intestines.

Oh my God, I love it. Yeah, we're going to do this after. This is such a good one.

It's so good.

Oh my God. It also feels good.

It feels good.

I see why you're so popular. Oh my God. Give me another one.

That's what I'm saying. It's because it feels good. So people are like immediately like, yes, I want to keep doing this.

Totally. Because so far you gave me two really good ones that are really easy to do.

Yeah.

That it doesn't like require much effort. It's just like you're sitting here, you might as well pull your hair. Right. And you might as well like put your finger on your forehead and, you know, press it up towards— like, it's like the easiest things.

Yeah, yeah, it's super, super easy. I do them on the plane like all the time.

Yeah, give me another one for— okay, give me one for bloating. And I think that's a big one.

I could—

everyone I talk to is bloated. Yeah, because that's gut health, because you do a lot with gut health too.

I do a lot with gut health. Yeah, so with bloating, there are— there's more of like a sequence that you want to do, but to get us started, we can sit with our ankles hip distance apart like this.

Okay.

Great. And then we're just gonna think about the tailbone rolling towards our knees and coming back up. Mm-hmm. And you're just gonna do that movement over and over again, and you can make it tiny, tiny. It's almost like chair twerking.

Yeah, it is kind of chair twerking. I like it.

Yeah. This is a seated pelvic tilt or seated pelvic clock for anyone who's familiar with somatics, you can also do this laying down on the ground.

And this helps with bloating?

This helps release some stress out of your body, which— this is why I said that there's kind of like a sequence that you wanna do. But if you practice this for about like 8 days and you do this little sequence for— that's like a 5 to 10 minute sequence for about 8 days, you'll notice a significant difference in your bloating.

This is amazing. Okay, wait, I wanna check something on your Instagram. So for the bloating one, when you do that, are you able, like, like you, you're telling me within 8 days people's bloating will go down?

Mm-hmm. Sometimes 3.

Really? Yeah. How, how long do you have to do the exercise for? Is it a minute? Is it 30 seconds?

I repeat each exercise for about a minute.

Okay.

And then there's like an intentionally, um, sequenced series of exercises that I take people through for different things.

So how important is sequencing though?

That's super important.

It's super important, right?

Yeah.

So like it's not just one exercise.

Exactly.

Like you're like for, for today, for our, you know, today because you're here showing me like, oh, here's one for this, here's one for that. But to get the best, like best bang for your buck, you need to do like a series together, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. It's like going to the gym. You can, if you do squats, yes, it's good for your butt. But if you do squats and deadlifts and an RDL and a Bulgarian, you're going to get the whole— every muscle in the— in your glutes.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Same thing.

Exactly the same thing.

Yeah. So now I'm really getting to understand this. So this is like literally like an entire different wellness modality to like, like basically make you stronger, you know, emotionally and fit, like everything.

Yeah. Make you stronger and prettier.

Yeah. Stronger, prettier, spiritual, more emotionally evolved, all the things. I love it.