From Forcing Health to Nervous System Healing with Mitch Webb & Manon on The Healers Café

body was broken and I was trying to fix it, and that’s a recipe for disaster, and it helped. I mean, I it worked until it didn’t, you know, it i was able. I learned so much from these things. But, you know, I was dove in headfirst to the biohacking world. I was fasting. That’s how I reversed, you know, low carb diets and fasting. And pushed that so hard until I gave myself a thyroid issue. I was so afraid of carbs and exercising and doing CrossFit, and body needs carbohydrates, but that’s just what the world was doing. And I, because I had head injuries, I assumed that I could like ketosis my way to healing. And you mean, you detox, you know, liver flushes, gallbladder flushes, long ass. Fast, seven, eight days, you know, cost every supplement known to man. I mean, I had a biohacking lab at my house. I had a hyperbaric oxygen sauna, cold plunge when, you know, I was had 15 different practitioners that I was seeing, and none of them were talking about trauma, and that’s kind of crazy. And so I left the corporate world, became a health coach and started teaching this stuff, and I was really good at getting people to lose weight, but I kind of feel guilty at this point now. I mean, I didn’t know that I was coaching from my trauma and teaching people how to overwhelm and force their way to health. I still use biohacking and some of these modalities, but it’s not as a tool to heal, you know. It’s, it’s a, it’s support to for whatever’s that day, you know. And so going back to the story, though, unless you have any questions,

Manon Bolliger  05:59

well, no, I think you’re gonna probably expand on that. What is, fundamentally the difference between dealing with a trauma based incident than doing your biohacking and putting Humpty Dumpty back together again by force?

Mitch Webb  06:16

Yeah, I mean, I’m meeting what’s here instead of trying to fight it or run away from it. You know, it’s softening into it and slowing down and and feeling the emotions and feeling the memories bubble up, and feeling the images and, you know, the the symptoms and sensations and welcoming everything and entrusting that, that the next step is always there, and if I can just be with it and learn to love it. And I have this analogy I’ve been sharing recently. It’s like traumas, like waking up with dog poo, like all over your whole body and and the things that we have learned to clean that, you know, they don’t work. You can’t scrub it, and there’s not enough hot water and soap, and it’s just like, not coming off, and you’re going crazy. And that’s what I was doing. I was using what I knew, which is, avoid it, dismiss it, and then, like, you know, beat the crap out of it with and I was a, you know, in sports, that’s the gear that I had, you know, I would run, if this would make sense, but I would run the football, and you could go score, but I wanted to go run somebody over, you know, I wanted to hurt people, and that was my aggression coming out and anger and all The stuff that I was stuffing down being a kid and not knowing how to deal with that, and feeling, you know, upon years later, looking back with so much hyper vigilance and unsafety and so much anger and fear and all the things. And I’m so glad that I had those outlets, but that became the only gear that I had is I’m going to overwhelm this with force. And it works in a certain situation, you know, that’s a good gear to have when you need it. But it’s like being David Goggins all the time and, you know, or and just yelling at somebody until they get it right. And that’s what I was doing, you know, it’s and it basically had to exhaust myself and explore all the things to see that it wasn’t working and they had to figure out a new way. And that’s kind of about the time I started diving into this work and learning more about the nervous system, and that became the lens that I see the world through. Is, is, I’m the medicine, and my clients are like, You are the medicine, like we know what we need. We’ve just been taught to we’ve been conditioned to disconnect from ourself, to abandon ourself, to take on all these protective roles, like people pleasing and intellectualization and perfection. And we think that’s who we are, but we’re really buried underneath all of that. And you know, I say this work is the great red pill, because it starts by waking you up to your own stuff and your family and relationships and society eventually, and you’re like, Man, this is, this is a, it’s a different world than it was when I started this journey. You know, because I’m seeing things more clearly. I’m not, I’m not in, I’m not in survival mode, and freeze and stuck, right?

Manon Bolliger  09:26

So, but do you think that it’s the survival mode operating through you? Then that led you to choosing the these types of, let’s call it more invasive but more challenging therapies, or, you know, this kind of ego based therapies, I don’t know what

Mitch Webb  09:52

you Oh, yeah, 100% I mean, that’s all that I do. I didn’t know anything else. I didn’t know my family, is not it? It doesn’t know what emotions are. They don’t know what emotional healthy is, you know? They don’t. I’m thinking like emotional immaturity, and how to say the other side of that. It’s a lot of narcissism and emotional immaturity. And I’m the black sheep, you know? I’m the I’m the problem, you know? And it’s a, we heard a quote yesterday. It’s like, if, if we don’t work on our demons, they raise our children, right? That’s what raised me, and that’s all I knew. Not that, not that they’re bad people either. Yeah, the best that they can, and they’re in survival. They handed that stuff to me, and I used the only tool that I knew, knew, which is overwhelming force, yeah,

Manon Bolliger  10:41

but the journey of overwhelming force obviously played a role in what you became and what your passion is, and your whole health journey in the end, like it’s because I often think, you know, gosh, How can you speed this up knowing now, like, Did you did you waste time or, or was that what your body kind of resonated with or needed, or you needed to go through that you need to be shown that path before you could go to the next one. Like, you know, sometimes I wonder about information and how we come across that question.

Mitch Webb  11:24

I’ve thought about that a lot. And I mean, I think I’m in the position now that I can save other people a lot of time, and that’s kind of what I’m doing. And it’s real easy to look at missteps and mistakes and say, Man, I could have gotten that earlier. You know, I would love to have been introduced. I wish I came with the operating manual of how to work with this human body and the emotion, all the things, you know, but that didn’t happen. And and I’m grateful for my journey, and I wouldn’t do it differently, because it made me who I am. I wouldn’t be. I mean, I’m the kind of person that’s kind of got to get my buck. I’m gonna say not anymore. I’m not, hopefully, but was the type of person that had to take the licks to understand. And you know, my my career in sports is what made me never quit. Yeah, my experience that I have attracts the clients that are perfect for me, and those are that’s who I am working with, and it scares the crap out of me that someone can get a PhD and prescribe very strong drugs and never have done the work themselves. So how are you going to meet somebody else and in their stuff. And so that was the gift, is I got my ass kicked, and I learned from it. And maybe it took me 1000 freaking tries. But that’s, that’s the beauty of the human experience. I think we, I think Earth is somewhere we come to learn lessons, maybe, and learning mine, yeah.

Manon Bolliger  13:02

It’s true. Because you’re somebody will resonate with your path or your transition. You’re sort of the bridge of, hey, we can do it another way, if you’re open, right and and because now you’ve done it, and people can get that right because you’ve done that. So they

Mitch Webb  13:22

think, like, coming from a man’s perspective, that’s been like, I have like a I kind of feel like I’m like a Joe Rogan of the mental health space, where I can relate to a lot of people. I used to think that my superpower was that I could be anyone, for any, anybody. I was like a chameleon, but I didn’t know who I was. But I’ve been so I’ve worn so many hats, you know, and I’ve been such a normal, browed out, frat boy, jock, redneck, you know, Hunter, you know, you never know. I have so many interests, and I feel like I can relate to the men. And I think where it’s, I mean, I’ll be honest, get into this work, and a lot of the guys feel very feminine. And it’s not that that that’s bad. I tend to be more friends with girls now than I do with guys, because they do the work and they can understand. So I get that. But it’s, it’s it’s being, I think it’s a little bit more approachable, certainly for the man that I’m working with, because they’re not as they’re not as interested in the work as the women are. It seems like to me, that’s my,

Manon Bolliger  14:32

yeah, no. I mean, I think you know whether it’s cultural or whatever, but there definitely is. I can I see what you’re saying. It doesn’t seem like, Oh, I’ve never experienced what you’re talking but I

Mitch Webb  14:48

mean, unless you’re asleep.

Manon Bolliger  14:51

Now, okay, so let’s talk about the work you’re doing now, right? So how? Do you start with people? They, they meet you, they there’s some association to the journey. They feel some connection there. How do you actually start with them? How do you get them to start their journey? Typically, I’m generalizing, of course.

Mitch Webb  15:18

You know, it’s funny ask that question, because I used to make me so uncomfortable. Until I got some really good I’m still learning, you know, I got some good tips from my mentor, Irene Lyon. And you know, health coaching is way easy. You know, I can come in and I’m like, Alright, where do you want to go? Cool. Where you at now? Yeah, what have you tried? You know? Okay, cool. And I can build out a plan, and we’re doing the plan, and, you know, we’re just kind of going, there’s, there’s an outcome and, and I know where you want to go and where you’ve been, and what you’ve tried and what’s worked, and what’s not and what’s let’s navigate around that. That’s easy, you know, well, and this is easy too, but in this work, we have to meet the moment and trust, trust the quantum field, the environment, whether we’re in person or not. And so how I come in, what do I where I start? I don’t know that. I can’t really say that’s that’s kind of hard to say. Where do you start? I think I’m starting by building rapport and building a relationship and trying to understand where this person’s at and what kind of capacity they have, what school skills they have, whether that’s in a physical, emotional and I really Start with what’s the low hanging fruit? Like they’re nervous, I have to trust that their nervous system will show me where we need to go. I don’t want to go to level three right away. I want to start at level one. I want to start at the level that you’re at, you know? And it takes some like, from my experience, it’s just building a relationship, building a conversation, and the next step will reveal itself and and if I’m trusting that, and they’re trusting that, learn to trust that kind of modeling, that in the in the call that our nervous system is the map, and it’s going to provide the next step. And if I can get out of the way with me having some expectation or some attachment to an outcome, and I can just be here with this person, and their system feels safe. It’s going to say, hey, here I am. And it may be we start with food, it may be we start with environmental health and learning about circadian biology and grounding, and, you know, avoiding blue light and then at night and getting sunlight in the morning. And, you know, working on environmental stressors like Wi Fi and fragrances that are inside and cleaning supplies that are in the house. Like, if people are coming to me, they’re typically got a lot of symptoms, they’re sick something, you know, they tried a lot of things and nothing’s working. And so I want to make sure they’ve got the foundation of, are they eating good food? Are they moving? Are they sleeping? Are they drinking water? Are they getting outside? What are their relationships like? Like, all that stuff is going to tell me what’s going on, and then from there, if the foundation is checked, and then we’re going into things like building of capacity, learning how to orient and be here now and follow our impulse and, you know, and once we’re doing it depends on a lot of my clients right now are more in a sensitized state, so there it’s kind of like global high and with a lot of over and under coupling and and there’s a lot of fear in that, and a lot of fixing, Right? So they’re using the biohacking stuff, and they’re end up chasing their tail, and they’ve got so much adrenaline and hyper vigilance, and what’s the word bewilderment in the system, they’re trying to figure it out. You know? It’s like, hey, that person doesn’t need to be doing somatic work yet. That person needs to learn to to meet that fear and be in the fire and know it’s not going to burn them and learn all these compulsive behaviors that they’re engaging in that are keeping them stuck. And, yeah, I mean, it’s like, it’s like a web right? And it seems so complicated, but to me, it feels like having a lot of tools at my disposal, and if I listen really good, the person will tell me what they need.

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Manon Bolliger  20:35

which one. Yeah. Which one’s the one to work with first? Yeah. So is that, is that kind of your, your journey? How, how it changed? I mean, you took yourself in hand, but not fixing it more, just listening to what your body was telling you, or how, how would you,

Mitch Webb  20:57

oh, my gosh. I mean, eventually, you know, it’s more recent, you know, to be honest, like the fixing and figuring out. Like I was very sensitized myself. I was crushed with fatigue and tons of anxiety, you know, and freeze with bunch of sympathetic and my life was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. I’m avoiding more and doing everything I can to put the fire out. And I had some great mentors along the way. You know, there’s a time when I couldn’t really feel my own intuition. I think our body is the map, and it pulls us out of whatever health hell hole we’re in, and I couldn’t listen. So I had someone that was a medium, and they were helping me, you know, connect to source and guides and get information. And, you know, I was dependent on her, and then I was dependent on something. There’s so many things when I couldn’t listen to my body. I had other people that were helping me, and I was doing all the research and just trying to fit a square through a through a circle, you know? And, yeah, it took a lot of repetition to get to the place where I’m like, Okay, I’m going to surrender to this, and I’m going to walk through the I’m going to walk through the fire of learning that my symptoms can’t hurt me, and I’m going to put down the compulsive behavior, and I’m gonna just feel my body and, you know, somatically track in a way that memories and emotions come up, and I’m kind of letting a little bit out at a time. And that took three, four years of doing this work, you know, that’s been in the last six months to be honest. I mean, yeah, made a big turnaround doing that type of stuff and but here’s the thing is, it’s like I had all these pieces from all these mentors and things that I learned, and when things click for me. I was just talking to Aaron, you know, earlier today, and it’s like I take these like quantum jumps because I’ve got so much, so many resources and so much experience that when I get what I need, it’s like it boom, it shoots me forward quite a bit. The thing too, like I could intellectualize it, yeah, knew the science, and I knew how it worked, and it’s like my body just hadn’t caught up yet, like I didn’t have the capacity to do the work that I knew my body needed because sensitization thing was in the way I had to deal with that first

Manon Bolliger  23:26

Okay, so let’s, I want to talk two things, the sensitization, could you like, expand a little bit more what that was for you, so that it’s kind of becomes realer, and the other part is surrender. What? What is that for you? But let’s start with the first one. I’ll try and remember the second

Mitch Webb  23:45

I wrote it down. Yeah, so sensitization is when we’ve got hyper vigilance from so we have an initial scary situation that happens, there’s fear, and then there’s symptoms, and then there’s a secondary fear of the thing happening again. Now we’re creating like these neuroplastic symptoms, like, for example, whenever we were hunter gatherers, this came in really handy whenever I went to the area of the woods Where the bear is and I get attacked, and I don’t want to go back there again, right? And so my body’s saying, danger, danger, danger. But because that fear is in my system, and it’s not completing, it’s like it continues to build up and it overwhelms and saturates my system with fear and hyper vigilance, everything becomes a fear or a threat. And so my system is constantly in fight or flight. And we know from, you know, polyvagal theory, if I’m up here in really high activation for a prolonged period of time, eventually that low, that high tone dorsal is going to come on. It’s going to freeze, and it’s going to bring me down here. And, you know. I was just talking with with Irene about this. And, you know, global high it kind of means, you know, our nervous system is just naturally very high sympathetic, and so it’s hard to get that to come down very simply and with, and I was like, you know, is that kind of the same thing? And she’s like, Yeah, but there’s some over coupling. And under coupling, where, for me, the way that looked is, whenever I had a symptom, whatever happened 24 hours before that, I blamed and it became all the things that I love to do. So it was exercise, it was food, it was people and places and and then my world just gets small. We get like agoraphobic can happen, meaning I don’t want to leave my house, and we basically the world gets really small because we’re avoiding everything, because everything’s a threat. And so to kind of come out of that, I had to see the compulsive behavior that I was using to figure out what was going on and to fix what was going on. And so when I could see it is, it’s almost like a lens. When that lens comes on, everything feels scary. My thoughts are spinning like crazy, and on the other side of that, I don’t even have those thoughts. I’m a completely different person. I’m just I’m in my window of tolerance. I’m feeling safe, I’m feeling good. I may have symptoms and things like that, but I don’t attach to them and and go on the ride. I kind of notice it, and if it wants to be here, okay, cool, you can. It’s kind of like having a roommate that sucks in the background. And so if you embodied that person, you brought them into life, and they were talking to you like the sensitization is talking to you. You wouldn’t listen for that long, right? So I’m like, oh, here it is again. I hear you. I’m not dismissing you and telling you to go away. I’m saying I hear you, and I can tell it’s in my stomach. I’m gonna sit here for five minutes and tell me everything, and then I’m gonna go back to what I’m doing, and you can be in the background, and that’s fine. And that’s it’s like everything is a wave. And so if I can let the wave come up and go down, then it completes and my brain isn’t going, that’s a that’s a priority, that’s a priority, you know. And eventually the brain goes, Oh, he’s not, you know, reacting to this anymore. So we’ll move on to something else. Does that make sense?

Manon Bolliger  27:11

No, it absolutely does, yeah. And then the because I feel like there’s still between that, where you’re you become more the noticer, so you are not taking things like that, that the only reality is the, you know, hyper sympathetic reality, that there’s at least two realities happening, but you’re that’s a

Mitch Webb  27:36

good point right there. I want to pause it right there, because it, I got this from Simona Erwin. She’s a good friend now, so I’ve been working with her and in her community and and I love doctor, Doctor weeks, Claire weeks is where I first heard about this information. And what, what Simona talks about is when we start to do this work, yes, being the observer, kind of like watching a leaf go down the water creek or river, whatever, and and then she talks about these two rivers, and there’s the river of fear and there’s the river of love. And so think about the river of love is like attachment, repair and inner child healing and Building Safety and capacity. And so yeah, I’m scared as crap right now, but I’m going to be really talking to myself nice and saying, Hey, I’m here with you. I see you. Not like, Oh, you’re safe. You got this. It’s more like, Hey, I’m here and I’m not going anywhere, right? Because we identify these younger parts and we’re able to say, what did that part need? You know? Like, oh man, you know what. It needed to belong. It needed to feel safe. It needed to feel like it mattered. It needed to feel loved and unconditionally loved. And it’s like, Oh, guess what? Nobody’s coming to give you that you know, but you can give that to yourself, and that’s the magic trick. And it’s just when that, when that trigger opens up all the things that I was running away from and avoiding, now I get excited for I’m like, Oh man, here’s another one. Like, what’s going to happen on the other side of this? Now I know it’s going to suck, and I’m not, like, fun. I mean, I’m excited in what’s going to happen and what I’m going to meet and what capacity can I gain, and you know what’s gonna happen with this? And, like, how much more can I can I love and learn about myself? And so it used to be, oh shit, here it goes. And now it’s like, oh shit. Like, let’s go. You know, it’s a little bit different, and that’s a big change for someone like me that was debilitated.

Manon Bolliger  29:39

Yeah, you know, you’re just saying something. I don’t know if I have the words for it, but my question, the next question for you was, how do you from this observer? It’s like, it’s a loving observer, right? How do you get to the space of that trust? Trust the trust in the universe. Trust the surrender like,

Mitch Webb  30:09

yeah, I wanted to know. So I think uncertainty. What is it self? Trust is safety, and uncertainty is a big part of not feeling safe, and so ultimately, we have to learn to trust ourselves. I never had that. I didn’t have that language. I never felt safe. I never trusted, you know, so that, how do we do that? You know, I’ve spent a lot of time asking those questions like, yeah, I want to trust what I do. Do that. You write it down a million times, and basically she said something that really makes sense to me, and it’s, you know, safety is something interest is something that’s built through repetition. And I would add to that, you know, you got to see the ball go through the hoop as an athlete, when you get the yips. The yips means I’m like, I’m like, an athlete. I know how to hit free throws, but for some reason, for certain periods of time, I can’t do it, and it’s driving me crazy, you know. And so there’s all kinds of tricks for the Yes, but ultimately, you got to see one go through this, through the hoop, so you can start to trust it. You build a little bit. Okay? And so for me, what was happening for many years, for a couple of years, you know, two or three, I’d say, really, one to two years because I was aware. I was consciously aware, and built some education. I knew I need to come up this wave and come back down to, you know, hit the top peak activation, and come back down and get back to a window of tolerance, of baseline. But I couldn’t do it, you know, and so I had this way of scaring myself out of it, from a lot of the teachers that I’ve had that was like, you’re going to do too much now, for somebody that’s listening and beginning like, you better be a little bit not scared, but hesitant, you know, aware of doing too much. You know, that’s that’s a big part of this work. Too much too soon, is not pretty, you know. So I basically learned a somatic practice where I could this, combining bottom up and top down. And I just kept coming up against that fear. And it was like, Well, what happens if you sit there at that door and just what happens next? And eventually, I was like, All right, well, I’m not gonna stop this time. I’m gonna go through it and see what. And it was like, you know, a minute and a half of some intense emotion that, like on the other side, I felt like a million bucks. And I’m like, Are you kidding me? That’s all I had to do is, is sit with it. Now, that’s very simple to say that too. So somebody that was in my role or my position a year ago, let’s say that would piss me off, but you got to build capacity and go slow and learn to trust. And I think safety is built by those little, little drops. It’s not some big, cathartic I wanted something like that, somebody who has used overwhelming, forceful life. I thought it was going to be this explosion moment, and I’ve had those as well. I wouldn’t recommend them. I find that, you know, the little practice and the little drops and the consistency with staying inside my capacity a little bit more having good people around me, and then feeling the results of staying with it and going, Oh, wow, this is way better, because I feel like you go up that, up that ride. Let’s call it a was it when you do this roller coaster, when you get when you’re going up it, man, it gets intense. And so I think if you get scared and you stop and you let your thoughts bring you out of the experience, going back into that. That’s a backlog. The whole system’s just getting clogged up, and that left me feeling like crap.

Manon Bolliger  33:49

Yeah, I once heard that to go through an emotion takes about 90 seconds. I forgot who said this, but I remember that statement being Pivotal, because myself, I would then just go, Well, I’m going through. Just stick with it. Just stick with it where it’s going to be done through, just be with it. And it’s like knowing that there is actually an end. It’s not, you know, because, again, this catharsis and this all that we’re so trained to believe that that’s the big purge and that it’s all going to come out that way, you know? And really, it’s much more simple, if we can relax into it and and know that there is an end. And, you know, we, we do move forward, right?

Mitch Webb  34:43

Yeah, well, that’s well, that’s self trust, that’s exciting, that’s trusting that what goes up must come down. My therapist would tell me that, and I’d be like, That’s great. I mean, I love hearing that. But, like, when’s it gonna come down? Because I’ve been, I’ve been. Fighting this emotion for 40 freaking years. Yeah, because I’m doing 30 seconds every time. I’m not 90, right? Exactly.

Manon Bolliger  35:08

Anyway, our time is up. That’s it. You need to write a book.

Mitch Webb  35:15

I definitely will someday.

Manon Bolliger  35:18

Anyway, thanks very much for sharing your parents and yeah, thanks. And I’m sure it’ll help a lot of people to kind of clear the journey. Well, that interview with Mitch, being an expert in the nervous system, really brings to me home the message of how when working with the body like as a bone therapist, how important it is to understand the way the sympathetic system and the personalities that thrive in that type of environment might at some point benefit by more somatic, more slower down body felt safe experiences, right? And Bowen is a perfect medium to really show the body that it can slow down, that you can also become the observer of your your physical experience. And that’s another door into the whole healing process.

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