SoulStirred: Stories of Growth And The Human Experience

Emily Garcia (00:00)
Welcome lovely listeners to SoulStirred, stories of growth and the human experience. I'm Emily Garcia. And I'm Kasey Clark. We will be your guides on this journey. We are so glad you are here. Each week we'll come together, sometimes with other incredible thinkers, creators, and adventurers to generously share stories of self-discovery, recovery, triumph, and what it means to live a life on purpose. No matter where you are in your own journey.

connection is here for you at SoulStirred. Settle in, take a deep breath in, and let's inspire each other. Welcome to SoulStirred

Emily (00:41)
Hi SoulStirred listeners, today we are back with Terry Clark for part two. Last week he talked to us about his 30 year career in federal law enforcement and the impact it had on him and his life. Today he is going to share with us about how his path to healing has been paved with mindfulness and flow. Welcome back Terry.

Kasey (01:03)
It was through your relationship with Dan, the doctor, that you were learning epigenetics, that also opened your mind and heart to this whole world of some like alternative healing, I'll call it, things that led you down the path of MBSR and towards ketamine and flow and all that. Can you talk a little bit about that branch of this complicated tree?

terry (01:07)
Right.

It's ironic when you think about the time that I spent enforcing the drug laws. And now you look at how far I've come in terms of I'm recognizing, well, I always recognize the imperfections of our federal system. That's a whole other story.

Emily (01:47)
Thank you.

terry (01:47)
But I'm also keenly aware of the problems with the DEA's Controlled Submissions Act and which substances that they regulated and which ones they outlawed and which ones are okay for the FDA to approve for prescription. And part of the problem is, if you've, if you looked at Michael Pollan's videos that he had on Netflix on Change Your Mind, he talks about psilocybin, magic mushrooms.

Kasey (01:48)
Stay tuned.

Yeah.

terry (02:16)
And the studies are so clear that there are lives being saved by these psychedelic substances. And I want to highlight here that it's important that they not just be used recreationally. Like, I think that there might be some benefit for people just to do them, just to do them, because of the neuroplasticity it creates in the brain. And I'm aware that for this to be able to survive this experiment, we need to actually

be clear that we believe in a structure and oversight and the intervention of professionals to provide these substances to people to use. Tim Ferriss is a big advocate. He put a lot of money into this MAPS, the group that's doing the study of the psychedelic substances at Johns Hopkins. He's a big supporter of it. And he says that using psychedelics...

Kasey (02:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

terry (03:11)
to cure your own mental health challenges is like doing brain surgery on yourself. He doesn't recommend either one of them. And so I'll borrow from Tim Ferriss, okay? I would say that when I did my ketamine, and I'll just disclose it right now, I just said I did a session with ketamine therapy here, and it was helpful to me in terms of dealing with some of my own internal work I needed processed.

Emily (03:16)
Hmm

Kasey (03:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

terry (03:39)
And I would say that it would have been better if I'd had a therapist to go through it with from beginning to end to prepare me before I did it and then to help me integrate it afterwards. And I didn't have that. But now I do have somebody and they're helping me do that work in terms of the integration. Because what I like to explain to people was that the mindfulness work that I've done, the reason I got certified in mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is

Kasey (03:48)
Yeah.

terry (04:08)
meditation and breath work, which I think is really valuable and it's a great way to do it. The reason I chose his, even though I've been meditating for years through spiritual practice, was that if I wanted to go out and teach it to law enforcement, that I had to have credentials and science behind me because those people are doubters. They're like, it's dating myself, but there was an old TV show called Dragnet where this actor that played this guy named Joe Friday would...

Kasey (04:26)
Yeah.

terry (04:34)
have his notebook out and he'd be talking to people and he had a saying, he'd say, just the facts, ma'am. Right. So if you're in law enforcement and you know, you're Myers-Briggs types, it's STJ dominant, right? Sensing, thinking, judging. And so it's, it's very sequential. It's very black and white. It's very in the box thinking for the majority of people that are in law enforcement. So if I was going to go back and try to help this, this very challenged community, who I have a very...

Emily (04:38)
I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Kasey (04:40)
Yeah.

Yes.

terry (05:02)
strong affinity for because when I think about my people, I think about my people as the people in blue because the people that I've bled with and the people I've buried, right? And I've actually had friends that committed suicide.

And that's a hard thing, right?

Kasey (05:17)
Yeah.

terry (05:18)
So I was motivated to go into mindfulness space because I wanted to provide relief and support for those folks. And I wanted to look at how the police engages with the policed, especially after the Floyd riots. If we look at all the vitriol going back and forth, there are a lot of people that were hurt on both sides of that argument unnecessarily because they wanted to vilify folks on both sides.

Kasey (05:31)
Yeah.

terry (05:45)
Some people were hurt because they saw what happened to George Floyd, rightly, right? Uh, he was killed by somebody in blue, uh, with no justification. He wasn't an active threat to that officer that knelt on his neck for what was it, seven minutes, right? Uh, he wasn't posing a threat to anybody. And I don't know what was going on inside that officer, but I know that some officers that are traumatized can, can.

to get stuck in a behavioral loop where they decide to perform a behavioral action based on the threat they perceive. And they get a loop of continuing to perform that until it's broken. Because they've lost access to the prefrontal lobe. They get in their amygdala. So I don't know, because I don't know what happened. I didn't see this come up in his defense. But I know that there have been people in wartime and officers that when they...

engaged with a firearm, they'll start pulling the trigger. And somebody has to stop them from pulling the trigger long after it's out of ammo. Cause the last thing they did when they got triggered was they actually started to squeeze their finger because they were trying to address a threat and they keep doing it even when there's no more ammo and there's no more threat. Cause they get in this loop where they don't break it and it has to be broken. So one of the things we train when we train people in law enforcement about using deadly force is that after you fire rounds, you scan left and you scan right.

And we do that not just because we want to look for new threats to the environment, but it breaks the tunnel vision and the tunnel hearing and the tunnel thinking. So, so we say fire your rounds, check your target and then stand left and right. And that's what we do in our training to break that tunnel vision, that tunnel thinking, right? That's something we can go ahead. What?

Kasey (07:27)
It's bilateral stimulation, M. It's bilateral stimulation. It's like what we do in EMDR with people to help them heal from trauma. By looking left and looking right, you're adjusting the brain's focus and taking it out of the traumatized cycle. Yeah.

Emily (07:30)
Right.

Yeah, it lights up the prefrontal cortex when you're doing that so that you can not act impulsively and you have your memory and your decision-making power.

terry (07:44)
Right.

Kasey (07:47)
Thank you.

terry (07:52)
So, so let's go back to the Floyd riots and the Floyd murder and what happened to America as a result. So all these folks were traumatized secondarily by seeing what happened to George Floyd. They had empathy for him.

And there was a reaction on some parts of some individuals then to attack law enforcement as an institution and all the individuals that were members of law enforcement. And they see the uniform and then they made this broad generalization that everybody in uniform is this bad racist person. And so all these people that are risking their lives who are heroes, who are the same people that they honored after 9-11 for running into the building and dying.

or running into the building and saving lives and pulling them out, and people were all celebrating them and holding them up as heroes, now all of a sudden they're calling them racists for doing their job. And it was hurtful. It was hurtful to me. It was hurtful to all my friends. Everybody that carried a badge and a gun was hurt when the president said that policing in the United States is systemically racist. Now he didn't say every police officer is a racist, but Joe Biden did say,

Policing is systemically racist on 60 Minutes. And he said it emphatically. All these people that carry a badge and a gun that wear a uniform or work out of uniform heard, you're a racist for being a police officer. That's not what he said. That's how it felt. That was the impact that they took. So what then happened was that a lot of these folks said, well, if I'm a racist for doing my job, for being proactive in these places that are very dangerous.

I'll stop doing that and that way I won't be a racist anymore.

So people literally stopped, they quit, they changed career fields, or they retired if they were eligible. Thousands of people left law enforcement as a result of that statement and of that attitude towards law enforcement. And the whole kneeling on the flag thing and all that. I know there are divergent opinions about freedom of speech and there's obviously a history of folks that are acting racist in law enforcement.

Kasey (09:45)
Yeah.

terry (09:59)
There have been many racist acts by the police. That's indisputable. There are racist acts in every industry, right? And it's been worse over the decades. Further back you go, the worse it was. So that's not disputable. The issue is we have to be sensitive to how we speak and how it impacts people around us. And that's true of everybody, whether you're running for office, whether you're in office, or whether you're speaking to people publicly about these other folks. When you hear people say that all immigrants are criminals,

Kasey (10:11)
Yeah.

Yeah.

terry (10:29)
That's hurtful to all immigrants or their families or people who support them. It ought to be avoided. We hear people talking about transgender people. You know, there are ways to say things if you have a position on policy that doesn't have to vilify or other the other person, you don't have to other people. And we need to be careful about that.

Kasey (10:30)
Yeah? Right.

What I, absolutely, you're right. And what I hear in what you're describing right now is very powerful because what I'm hearing is the societal trauma response. It's groups of people who are taking their fear and reaction to trauma and needing to vilify other groups of people because someone has to be bad and wrong for the fact that I have so much pain and hurt and harm.

terry (11:16)
Yeah, that's the archetype, the hero, villain, victim, right?

Kasey (11:17)
It's right. We're all living in the tr- in the trauma triangle, right? Rescue or perpetrator victim. It's like, what if we start to get consciousness above the triangle? Then what? That's what you're proposing here. So keep going. Yeah. We're captivated.

Emily (11:25)
Uh huh.

terry (11:29)
Right? Right.

So that's why, that was my why, talking about Simon Sinek, right? My why in getting certified mindfulness based stress reduction was it has hundreds of studies behind its validity for its impact in terms of physically making you safer, in terms of dealing with it with a traumatized world. It helps you drop your blood pressure. It helps you emotionally regulate. It helps you sleep better and enhances your relationships with yourself and others.

So give me more of that, please. I'll So with those statistics I've got it and I've trained law enforcement on how to be more mindful. And my big driver is twofold. One is I want police officers to be safer. I want them to survive their jobs. I want them to have better relationships with their family and a better, emotionally regulated and healthier and happier police officer is better. to those people that were othered when they saw George Floyd murder.

So it doesn't have to be an either or. This is one of those biggest both ands we could ever do in the United States is we can look out for our police and we can respect and honor their sacrifices and child protective services. And I see people wanting to hold firefighters up as heroes, but then they leave out police now because they think the police are bad guys. The thing is that if you don't have anybody to enforce the laws, you've got anarchy. And then it's just whoever's the baddest person.

Kasey (12:56)
Yeah.

terry (12:59)
that doesn't honor any rule or code, or the person with the most guns, they're the ones that are gonna rule the turf on the neighborhood. And do we wanna live in that country?

Kasey (13:04)
Yeah.

Yeah. I don't want to live in a world where I can't call 911 and expect the actual rescuer to show up in a few seconds or minutes. Yeah, of course we're grateful for our law enforcement.

terry (13:18)
Right. So, so look, when I started doing the mindfulness based stress reductions, because I became so aware of the value of mindfulness and meditation. Right. And so I learned all that and I wanted to do that. So I could bring it back to law enforcement, but law enforcement is just like my first community, I want to help everybody that's got these problems. Right. And so we talk about trauma. We talk about PTSD. We talk about how to.

Emily (13:19)
Okay.

terry (13:46)
avoid PTSD by managing trauma in the moment, being more resilient, right? But all those factors require that you're also doing the other things. It's not just your time on the couch. It's, it's creating a better environment for sleep, right? It's getting your sleep. Cause when you sleep, your brain actually shrinks down and squeezes like a sponge. It activates your glymphatic system. So what happens is that they've looked at brains during sleep and deep sleep.

And as it squeezes down, it opens up these little canals. And the canals open up and your body expresses all the toxins from your day's activity and those all leave your brain and the nutrients come back in. If you're not sleeping deeply for a certain amount of time, that doesn't happen. And it's gonna contribute to all this other dysfunction in terms of your lack of ability to emotionally regulate, your ability to think clearly, your ability to be present with other people.

your ability to handle complex tasks and to shift focus, all that doesn't work if you're not sleeping.

But that's why I got trained in MBSR. And I really believe in it. So if you ask my sister, I don't know how many guided meditations I've shared with her, but I believe that folks who don't know about meditation, that they ought to practice it and they ought to get exposed to it. And there's a lot of free resources out there now.

Kasey (14:58)
Yeah.

whole family meditates now because of Terry.

Emily (15:10)
I love

terry (15:11)
Okay, so when we talked about ketamine, ketamine is a dissociative. It's not actually a psychedelic. So you want to understand what the different actual titles are of the different substances, because they act differently on your brain and they have different impacts. Now they have some similar impacts. And so the one that they're doing the most studies on right now is psilocybin. And part of that, I think it's just because Americans have a bias for natural plants, they like to think that if something's natural, it's safer.

Kasey (15:40)
Yeah.

terry (15:41)
You know, poison ivy is natural too.

Kasey (15:43)
Good point.

terry (15:44)
Right? So was arsenic. Right? Well, those are naturally occurring substances. Right? So let's just, let's notice that just because something originates in a plant, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to have more impact or be safer. And there's a quote from a very famous physician, I think it was like from the 1400s, but he said...

Kasey (15:49)
Okay.

Make it good. Yeah.

terry (16:11)
The dose is the poison.

Kasey (16:13)
Mmm.

terry (16:14)
And so let's think about that. You know, almost anything that we want to take, there's a safe amount, there's a therapeutic amount, and there's a dangerous amount. And you always want to know which is which. It'd be clear about what you're doing and how much you're doing it, right? They've done studies recently that show that nicotine has a lot of value in terms of a cognitive enhancer. But how you get your nicotine is critically important. You don't want to be...

smoking it or inhaling it at all, because there's no safe amount of anything you wanna inhale other than clean air that you wanna put in your lungs. So if you're doing anything to put something into your lungs for some other reason, find another pathway, would you? I just wanna say that as my public service announcement. Find another way to get it in, okay? So ketamine is a dissociative. The reason that it was allowed...

when psilocybin wasn't, and LSD wasn't, and MDMA was not, and FI-DMO, and ibogaine. The reason that those weren't allowed was that they got put on that list by the DEA in the 60s when they had the counterculture revolution where people were dropping acid. And it scared a lot of the people that were the people that were the running the country.

They were afraid of all these people, all these hippies, like dropping acid and protesting, and they thought it was all part of one thing. And they thought that people were going to jump off of buildings because they thought they could fly. And it was really a lot of overwrought handwriting that shut down something that was actually providing a lot of value to a lot of people then. So we've lost generations of studies that could have told us what the value was. But we are where we are now. Ketamine was allowed because it was an anesthetic.

So the use of it for mental health treatment was just an off-label use of something that was already an approved drug by the DEA. The other psychedelic substances were not allowed because they're on schedule one of the Controlled Substances Act. The schedule one says, there is no legitimate law enforcement purpose. I mean, I'm sorry. There's no legitimate medical purpose. I misspoke.

Kasey (18:10)
Mm-hmm.

Mm. So that's what math is trying to dispute right now is to combat that law to say yes, there is medical purpose and we can prove how it helps in my.

terry (18:34)
Right. Well, there are already, there are already designations of psilocybin and MDMA as, as breakthrough drugs, which gives them a higher priority in terms of how fast the DA is going to give them a look. And part of that is because both Republicans and Democrats have supported that movement because they all, both Republicans and Democrats, it's one of the few things they agree on is that they want our veterans to heal faster from PTSD.

that they got while they're protecting us from those threats out there. And because both Republicans and Democrats want us to treat those veterans with respect and kindness, they want to get these therapies out there because it can reduce the avalanche of suicides by our veterans. So that's really big. So what happens though, is that when you meditate, there's a great book I want to recommend to people. One of the coauthors is Daniel Goldman.

Kasey (19:03)
Yeah.

Emily (19:05)
Hmm.

Kasey (19:19)
Yeah.

That's right.

terry (19:29)
Daniel Goldman is the guy that came up with the emotional quotient, right? He wrote the book, Good to Great and Built to Last, two great bestsellers. And he's a professor at Colorado University in Boulder, right? UC Boulder. So he's a really bright guy that's really forward leaning on this stuff. He wrote a book with a coauthor called Altered States, Altered Traits. And Altered States, Altered Traits is the title. And what he talks about is that...

Kasey (19:42)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

terry (19:59)
They've studied the brains of these lifelong meditators and they found that the more time you spend on the cushion, the better able you are to emotionally regulate.

Kasey (20:10)
Mm-hmm. And I.

terry (20:12)
And so it gives you better ability on your corpus callosum to switch from left brain to right brain and hold duality. This idea that we exist now and at some point we won't exist. Right? Those are both true at the same time. But how do you wrap your head around the fact that at some point you're not going to be here? That locks a lot of people up. They can't get past the thought, I can't deal with death. Well, whether you deal with it or not.

Kasey (20:26)
Yeah.

Yeah.

terry (20:40)
It's gonna be a part of your story.

Kasey (20:43)
Yeah, yeah. How the story ends for you.

terry (20:44)
So he talks about all the states, all our traits, about all the great things that happens to your brain as a result of meditation, mindfulness. But my experience shows me, and what I've learned from my studies, is that every time you meditate, you have this incremental impact on your brain, this incremental impact on your brain, little bit at a time, little bit at a time, little bit at a time, thousands of hours. What they're finding through psychedelics is you can actually move more rapidly to these places.

But then if you do integrative work, you can then, you can hold on to some of that change that happens while you're under the psychedelic state. So Kasey will talk about her ketamine experience like mine, where we became keenly aware of some of the things that we were afraid of and that we were hurt by. And with that awareness then, when you're sober then and you're on the couch, you're talking to your therapist, then you can go integrate this work. And you can do that with your journaling and you can do it with your mindfulness practice.

Those are three different ways that you can hold on to what happens under the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience has a physiological impact on you, where it actually can degrade these ruminative pathways. You know, the ruminative pathway is your tendency to go back to that thing that's been your fear or your anxiety. So the fear or your hurt or something that's happened in the past, right? And the anxiety is the thing that you're afraid of happening in the future, right?

Kasey (22:11)
Mm-hmm.

terry (22:11)
And so the rumored pathways, when you get triggered by something that reminds you of something similar to that, is your brain goes into that rut of thinking. So if you think about you're driving across a field in a car and it's an open field, your brain will want to go where the rut is. What we talk about as a rut of thinking, it's a place where we've been, it's well worn. What we know from the brain science is that when you have a thought,

The thought makes these synaptic connections between the axions where they actually bridge out and they form connections to other parts of these little things that look like branches, right? And they've done that, they've shown that with this imaging technology where they've seen it happen and they can do it in a Petri dish with brain tissue that's not even part of anybody's brain where it's reaching out to other brains when it's stimulated with an electric current, right? So what happens with this electric current that's going through your brain when you're actually...

Kasey (23:02)
Yeah.

terry (23:07)
just thinking chemically, is when you have a thought, these connections are happening between the axions, it's creating new branches. Well, if you have a thought that's ruminative, that every time you have a thought that it's attaching more of these synaptic connections to it, it gets more and more well-worn and more and more broken in, and it's more available to you. And that's why more and more things make you think about it. It's the same thing that happens in addiction. When you're using a substance,

Kasey (23:30)
Right.

terry (23:34)
or you have a behavior that's addictive, your brain starts to build more and more pathways to it. It becomes a preferred pathway. And the definition of addiction is when you prefer that thing or that action or that substance over other things in your life that give you pleasure. You start to prefer it to other things that give you pleasure that are part of your life that are productive, right? That's what we call addiction, right? So your brain becomes addicted to that fear or that hurt of the past.

Kasey (23:54)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Emily (23:56)
Mm-hmm.

terry (24:02)
or that anxiety about incurring it in the future, that's worry, right? So what a psychedelic can do is it can break down as ruminative pathways that are dysfunctional and don't serve us. If we journal about it, if we go to therapy about it, if we do talk therapy, right? If we meditate about it, if we notice our pattern of thought, and then we can say, that pattern of thought isn't serving me anymore, I want a different pattern of thought. The psychedelic also lays down something called spindles.

Those spindles are the microscopic molecular level aspects of the brain that the axions connect to synaptically. So it breaks down the old pathways and it lays down these spindles that makes it possible for you to develop new pathways that you can prefer over those old pathways. So that's where the power of psychedelics comes in, is if you can be prepared mindfully to be able to go into this experience, which can be very fraught.

Kasey (24:47)
Mm-hmm.

terry (24:58)
because your brain might represent something that's been a fear or a trauma in the past as an entity, like a monster or a beast or a reptile or a dragon. All these things can manifest when you're under psychedelics and they can be very fearful for you. But if you prepare with a therapist or a guide that actually understands all this stuff, they can help you be ready for that experience with set and setting. So set and setting says, okay.

What is your intention that you have set? And what is the environment that you're experiencing the psychedelic substance under? Do you feel safe? Do you feel comforted? If it gets scary, is there somebody there that they can actually put their hand on you and ground you and you can open your eyes, you can see them and they can say, I'm here, you're not alone.

That's big stuff to know you're not alone in that experience where you're facing your demons literally. You know, we talk about it metaphorically, but when you're in psychedelic state, you face your demons literally. They manifest as entities in some cases, and that can be very fearful. But if you know that's gonna happen, you can prepare for it, and you can say, oh, that's just my fear, or that's my anxiety, or that's a bad thing that happened to me when I was 12, when somebody did this thing to me that shouldn't have been done to a kid that was 12, right?

Kasey (26:14)
Yep.

terry (26:14)
You can say, this is my chance to process this, and it's gonna give me a better life on the other side. So there are two things you wanna do, is you wanna trust that nothing's gonna happen to you, you can't handle, and then you wanna be curious. So you wanna trust that nothing is gonna happen, you can't handle, and you wanna be curious about what is happening, and what is its story, what's its lesson for you. And these are things you can take back into life. If you can say, nothing's gonna happen, I can't handle.

Kasey (26:35)
Yeah.

terry (26:42)
And I'm going to be curious about what's happening. You can watch your life unfold and you can do it resiliently with a presence. And that's why I support these services.

Emily (26:49)
That's so powerful. It sounds like all of these different things that you've learned over time translate into the work that you do now, because you're not just working, you're not only working with law enforcement. Now you're doing some other things with organizations that are outside of law enforcement, right? Yeah. Tell us a little bit about how you work with them.

terry (27:10)
Right. So my hope is that.

Well, honestly, I'm not working with any of these organizations one on one today because I'm focused on writing my book and it takes a lot of time and energy for me. Uh, but I, while I'm writing the book and while I'm planning out the video subscription series and the training program, I'm working with a few people. We're going to, we're going to have, uh, epigenetic testing to identify what your deleterious gene profile is and what your polygenic risk score is, which is based on your SNP's

Kasey (27:19)
Mm-hmm.

terry (27:41)
A SNP is a single nucleotide polymorphism. That's one line of code in the spiral double helix of the staircase of your DNA. Each line of code has two spots on it with Cs, Gs, As, and Ts. That's your actual DNA. And then your epigenome is that when that, your DNA when it's in a cell is all spooled up and compressed and microscopic. But when your cell is going to replicate, it opens up and it runs that chromatid.

through a splicer that separates it and it replicates it. And then your chromosome, if it were laid out end to end, would be six feet long. That's how much data is inside each cell inside your body. But when that opens up, it's impacted by all of the biochemistry that's present as a result of the choices you make about your life. Right? So what's going on is that in this ecosystem that this business that I'm gonna run with my friends,

Kasey (28:24)
Wow.

terry (28:42)
and my partners is we're going to do this test on folks. We're going to get their DNA code. We're going to tell them what their propensity is genetically to be bipolar or schizophrenic or depressed or anxious or have ADD or have foggy thinking. And then there are aspects of their DNA that are going to impact how that manifests. And that can be your comp T gene, which impacts how you deal with dopamine or your MTHFR gene. And that has to do with like your anxiety.

Kasey (29:06)
Mm-hmm.

terry (29:11)
of scale, so to speak. It's got to do with your methylation factors. And if you're methylated, then a gene is not available to be turned on and off. But if it's acetylated, it is. This is very deep DNA science, but we have to understand it if we're going to be able to impact it. But most folks I talk to say, Terry, I'm glad you know that, but I don't really give a shit. All right, just tell me what to do.

Kasey (29:24)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, our clients say the same thing to us. Can we skip the part where I have to feel my feelings and will you just tell me what to do?

Emily (29:37)
Yeah.

Magic one

terry (29:42)
And you guys like sorry? No.

Kasey (29:44)
Yeah, we're like, no, sit back down.

Emily (29:45)
you

terry (29:46)
So here's the thing about that. So the business is going to take their DNA. We're going to run it through this bioinformatic program, which is all the most modern current information that's available about all those individual SNPs. So we get these profiles for folks. We take their blood test, and we're going to measure their phenomic experience of their cognitive function. So how much working memory do I have? That tells you about your executive function in your prefrontal lobe. So that and then like.

Kasey (30:13)
Yeah.

terry (30:16)
You know, I felt a little down today, or I'm feeling like I just can't get started, or I have anxiety, I'm afraid of something that's gonna happen in the future. As we measure these aspects of our brain performance and our brain experience, and we know what our DNA is, and we know what our lifestyle is, our coaches we're gonna have who were trained in all the stuff that I'm trained in, will help them with their interventions. And then you know from when you're a coach, Kasey, I'd give people their homework, right?

Kasey (30:44)
Yeah.

terry (30:45)
And so we'll help them decide what they want to do first to help them get the most impact earliest that's going to give them their better life that sets up that fortuitous cycle that gets them to go back to the gym or gets them to go back to sleep at night. Right. Turn off the TV, right. Get off of social media, cut down on their marijuana or their nicotine or their alcohol use, right. Make sure that they're doing the things that are healthiest for them, that they're going to spend time with the people that they can trust that love them, that are going to create that supportive environment.

that they kind of pay attention to their peer group. Because we know that we've become the five people we spend the most time with, right? So we want to be clear about who are those five people. Like, am I hanging out with five people that are shooting fentanyl in their vein? Well, if I don't want to be somebody shooting fentanyl in my vein, then maybe I should probably stop hanging out with those five people. Maybe I should hang out with the five people that are meditating, that have a spiritual practice, that are going to the gym, and maybe donate their time to the homeless shelter. Maybe I want to be more like those five people.

Emily (31:22)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey (31:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

terry (31:46)
Right?

Kasey (31:46)
And I suspect this is relative to Goldman's book you were referencing earlier, Altered States, Altered Traits, because the more of us that can get onto this, the more often and deeply in our systems we're changing our DNA, which means creating a better future, correct? For those who come after us, because death is certain for those of us, for all of us. That's the point I imagine you're walking towards?

Emily (31:46)
Great.

terry (31:52)
Right.

Yes, yes. So while we're here, I've actually got a letter here some place that I wrote myself. If you've ever been through a mindfulness experience in a program, they'll have you write a letter yourself about what your intention was when you started. And you guys do that with therapy sometimes too. Like before we begin this endeavor, I want you to talk about what your hoped for outcome is. Right? So I had two intentions when I started my mindfulness journey that was formal.

Kasey (32:12)
Yeah.

Yeah.

terry (32:38)
One was to be more present in every moment. And one was to be more engaged with the persons I was with in those moments. I think that if I can get those two things, I'm gonna have a pretty good life. And if I can provide that to other people, I can help them have a better life. So that's kind of my, Simon Simic says that's my why.

Emily (32:45)
Yeah.

Kasey (32:48)
Yeah, I think so too.

I love your why.

Emily (32:58)
Yeah.

terry (32:59)
Emily, I've been talking so long you haven't had a chance to get your word in edgewise. I'm going to pause. Why don't you tell me your question?

Emily (33:03)
Oh. Well, so actually, my question is, as we as we're wrapping up, I know that there are people who have heard this and are going to want to keep an eye on what is happening with you and your colleagues as you're developing your program. So where can they watch for what's next? Are you on social media? Is it a website? Where can they look for you and your book?

terry (33:29)
Yeah, if they go to the show notes, my current website is abovethegenes.com. So it's all one word above the genes. And the reason I copyrighted that name and made that the name of my business is that epigenetics is literally, epi means above and genetics is the gene. So above the gene, that's what I name my company.

Emily (33:53)
Very cool. Yeah. That's the great.

Kasey (33:53)
Very clever. Yeah. Also changing all of the things that happen above the literal genes. I mean, J-E-A-N-S that we wear is the way to alter the genes G-E-N-E-S. Very clever, Terry

terry (33:55)
I like literal.

Right here. Right here.

Emily (34:05)
I'm sorry.

Right? Yes. Yeah.

terry (34:13)
Yeah, so my point is that you'll see this one when the book comes out and I'll come back on it when I do the book tour. But one of the first paragraphs that I write in the book, and I'm not going to steal the thunder, but I will tell the story briefly, is that, you know, I jumped out of an airplane once, skydiving, and I had my arms and legs out, like the goalpost thing, and you're supposed to like...

to slow down your fall and to have it under control. And my chin strap was buzzing against my face. As I reached up to adjust the chin strap because you're flying so fast, you got all this air, right? I brought my hand up and my shoulder dipped towards the ground, right? And I'm like, wow, I'm not flying. I'm falling, I'm not falling, I'm flying. My hands are actually deciding what happens to me here. And I tell that story because

Kasey (35:03)
Yeah.

Emily (35:03)
Wow.

terry (35:06)
I want people to understand epigenetics and DNA and these lifestyle choices. And I want them to realize that they're not just falling at terminal velocity toward, towards their unavoidable death. That they actually have control over how their DNA manifests. And it's all these choices they make about sleep and nutrition and meditation and relationships and mindfulness and breath work and, you know, grateful attitudes and journaling.

All these aspects of these levers that we can pull, those are going to dictate not only like how long is it going to be between when we die in some cases, but how well do we live between now and then.

Kasey (35:47)
I love that. You are the leader of your own life and you have a lot more control than you tell yourself you do.

Emily (35:48)
Wow.

terry (35:54)
That's what I believe.

Emily (35:54)
Yes. That is the perfect way to wrap it up. And I know we need to have you back because there is so much more that we can learn from you.

Kasey (35:56)
Brilliant.

Yeah.

terry (36:05)
Well, this has been fun. And as you can see, I sometimes have a lot of words. So there are more words there if somebody wants to listen to.

Kasey (36:12)
You had the just right amount. And I know that our listeners will connect with something of what's been said today. I am in awe of you. You really have learned a lot along the way. And I see you transforming right before my eyes. And I just really respect you. And I'm really, really proud of you. And I love you very much.

Emily (36:14)
Yes.

Yeah.

terry (36:32)
Thank you. Life is good.

Emily (36:35)
Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Yeah, more with Kasey's brother, Terry. Thank you for joining us. And I am so excited for our listeners to hear what you, all of your wisdom that you've shared. We really appreciate it. To our listeners, if you have heard this and you want to share it with someone, you thought of someone, please.

Kasey (36:35)
This was awesome. More with my brother. Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Emily (37:01)
share the podcast episode with them. It's the best way for people to know what we're doing and to hear about Terry. So thank you, Terry.

Kasey (37:11)
Thanks so much everybody. Take good care of yourselves and each other.

Emily Garcia (37:20)
Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of SoulStirred, Stories of Growth and the Human Experience. We hope our stories have touched your heart and sparked reflections in your own journey.

Therapist, we are not your therapist and this podcast is not a substitute for therapy. If you find yourself in need of professional support, please don't hesitate to seek it. Your well-being is important and there are professionals out there who are ready to help. We encourage you to carry the spirit of growth and connection with you. Life is a continuous journey and we're honored to be part of yours. Stay tuned for more captivating stories in the episodes to come.

Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.