How we heal from trauma can be puzzling. Listen as Tom shares his journey of discovering Autonomic Healing, how over 30 years he's pieced together his essential findings to bring a therapy that enables somatic, cognitive, and spiritual healing.
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How we heal from trauma can be puzzling. Listen as Tom shares his journey of discovering Autonomic Healing, how over 30 years he's pieced together his essential findings to bring a therapy that enables somatic, cognitive, and spiritual healing.
Thanks for listening!
You can follow us on
Facebook
Instagram
Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts
Check out the Autonomic Healing Website
We appreciate you!
Welcome to the Autonomic Healing Podcast. I'm Tom Pals.
Ruth Lorensson:And I'm Ruth Lorensson. We'll be unpacking what it looks like to activate your brain to holistically manage stress and trauma that bring healing to the mind, body and spirit,
Tom Pals:being free to live authentically as humans.
Ruth Lorensson:Thank you for joining us. Let's get this conversation started. Tom, we're going to spend a bit of time getting to know you in this episode. We want part of this podcast, I think to involve your story. In the future, we will be sharing more stories of past clients and we'll be having guests on the show sharing their story. We'll be sharing stories from the therapists you've been working with and training, and you'll be hearing part of my story. And the reason is, that all of these stories actually are stories of hope. And there's this journeying towards healing. But what better place to start than with you, Tom,
Tom Pals:I can think of a few. But we'll let's go.
Ruth Lorensson:Before we go back into some of your story, particularly how you discovered AHA, I'd just love to you to share what's happening now. And you know, some of the exciting developments that are taking place with Autonomic Healing.
Tom Pals:I would describe where things are now as embryonic. We're doing this podcast, and I'm writing a book on AHA.
Ruth Lorensson:Which is very exciting.
Tom Pals:Yes, very challenging. Over the past several years, I've had so many people ask me, where can I learn more about this? Where can I read more about this, and all I can tell them is that it's in my head. So the book and the podcast as a way to get the information out of my head. And I'm closing in on being halfway in writing the book. And I started training with therapists who have experienced the benefits of AHA and want to become practitioners themselves. Ruth, you've developed an interest in seeing how autonomic healing can be a part of community. And to be part of a community with others who have this way to manage stress in body mind and spirit is very exciting to me. As for the future, who really knows what lies in store for any of us, I can envision possibilities for how AHA could be a part of healing the stress and trauma that is so much a part of people's lives, not just here in the US, but across the world, especially with the impact of COVID and a host of other issues. Even as we are having this conversation, Europe is at war, which was unthinkable only a short time ago, and is now a traumatic reality. Because seeing a woman in Ukraine being interviewed and suffering emotionally just calls out to me.
Ruth Lorensson:Yes, it's been an intense week, hasn't it? And it's just highlighted again. The world we live in with intense levels of stress, anxiety, and trauma. You know, even just being part of America and watching it, you can imagine the levels of anxiety that people are going through. But obviously the people in Ukraine, dealing with those levels of trauma
Tom Pals:It's not getting easier
Ruth Lorensson:It's not! And then you know, obviously we've just come from well, we're still in COVID. So I think those things so difficult, like such hard spaces to navigate as human beings. But thank you for sharing a little bit about where we're at with autonomic healing, because I do think that there's, you know, just some exciting things on the horizon there for us. I agree with you. It's about getting, I remember when I first met you and had my AHA session, I think one of the first things I was like, how come everyone doesn't know about this?
Tom Pals:It was only in my head, and only people who had experienced it, that knew about it.
Ruth Lorensson:Part of the reason for this podcast, like you say is is to get the word out. So I just want to interject here and just thank all of our listeners, because we've had so much encouragement so far, this is like a new endeavor for us. Thank you so much for leaving reviews and sharing and liking us. It means the absolute world to us.
Tom Pals:And downloading and listening.
Ruth Lorensson:Yeah, absolutely. It's wonderful. But and I just wanted to ask you, Tom, I think that the main question when it comes to your story, and and really the story of autonomic healing activation is how did you discover AHA? I'm sure the listeners want to know that. And I know that's it's not a simple one story piece, it's been a discovery that's been into woven throughout your life. So it's a bit could we start there?
Tom Pals:Yeah, I've been asked that many times. How did you figure this out? It's tempting to say discovering AHA was an'aha' moment. See how funny I am. But that was not how it happened.
Ruth Lorensson:You made me laugh. Dad, humor is always good. Anyway, it was like a series of'aha' moments that you experience when you put together a jigsaw puzzle. So when you sit down to a table to put together a jigsaw puzzle, someone has already created the picture and cut it up into 1000 pieces. Thank you very much. This is called entertainment. I've done this many times in the past, usually during a holiday break with family. Looking at the backs with the picture, the pieces would start getting sorted by ones that were alike and seem to fit different areas of the picture. The sky pieces together, the windmill pictures pieces, the pieces with parts of people in them and so on. Well, putting together a jigsaw puzzle is a matter of identifying similarities and differences in shapes. And then the 'aha' moments of this piece fits with that piece and goes there as the pictures reassembled. Discovering autonomic healing activation was actually the opposite. Because I didn't have a picture to reassemble, just the goal of what I was hoping could be accomplished, which was a way to deal with stress and trauma, that was healing, with the picture emerging as pieces started coming together. So you weren't trying to create a new treatment for stress and trauma at all, then?
Tom Pals:No, not at all. It's important to emphasize that I came to this not as a neuroscientist or an academician, but as a professional caregiver and therapist. Dealing with the impact of unresolved stress and trauma can be truly puzzling. I had a lot of trauma in my childhood. And that puzzled me. And I've described myself as a child as feral, something that was once domesticated but because of trauma had gone wild. Trauma made me feral. Federal means a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication, not house trained or housebroken, not tame and not used to humans. That was my childhood. My childhood was like the family cat that stops living in the house and runs wild around the farm. It doesn't mean the cat doesn't want to be adopted and live in the house. It does. It just can't abide it. My daughter and I adopted a farm cat. We started feeding it on the back porch. And eventually she moved into the house. I think at one point she had been domesticated, but she got out and was living feral. My daughter named her Rose. And when we moved to a new house, Rose escaped out into a vacant field nearby. That's what she'd known. And that was really upsetting to everybody. And the next morning, she showed up on the porch covered in sandhurst. And the next day, the front door was left open as we were moving things in and Rose darted out. And she got a few feet from the house looked around, and darted back in. Never wanting to leave the safety of the house again. A night back in the wild was not to her liking. And my daughter's love was home to Rose.
Ruth Lorensson:I just want to bring something up that you just mentioned, which I just think is such a true statement. You said that dealing with years of trauma and stress is truly puzzling. And I just I mentioned it because it made me think about, you know, some of my own space and my story. And I think, you know, before coming to you and doing AHA I think I spent decades, like researching trying to figure out, it was like questions that I had, how do I fix this? I can't fix this. And so I just wanted to thank you for that comment. Because I think so many of our listeners are in that place. You know, we're googling for answers. We don't know how to, how do we deal with generalized anxiety disorder? How do we how do we deal with stuff when trauma is stored in our body? So I think the puzzling nature of stress and traumas is so important, and it's why for you, you kind of kept going, kept pursuing these these answers, and obviously for you that puzzlement started in your childhood, some of your childhood experiences there.
Tom Pals:When I first started thinking about this episode, I started listing my own childhood and adult experiences of trauma, it got ridiculously long and I kept losing track of where to start, and especially where to end. And what do I include and not include that won't be traumatizing for people even hear about it. My entire life has been sitting down with a jigsaw puzzle pieces of a picture of stress and trauma scattered on the table in front of me, and trying to make some sense of them. I wanted to find a way home like Rose, except home was my own body, mind and spirit. 1000 piece puzzle can take up to 30 hours to reassemble the picture. Discovering AHA was like 1000 piece trauma puzzle that took me that many years to sort out a beneficial way to deal with it. From when I started graduate school with my first master's degree and seeing that picture emerge. That first master's degree was focused on the mind and spirit, learning and understanding about human beings and God, who for me was all about love, love that benn lost, love that had been found, and love that was constantly being confounded. I'll spare you the 1000 pieces and focus on a few of the most important ones. For the clinical portion of the Master of Divinity degree I was assigned as a chaplain intern to the oncology ward in a hospital. The particular ward was the terminal one for patients had weeks and months to live, and were wanting someone to care spiritually and emotionally for them. I remember sitting around the table with a number of other students and the chaplain going from one to the next, asking where they wanted to serve. I was the last in line and strangely when it came to my turn to choose, there were only two or three options left and the chaplain didn't ask which I wanted. She said she wanted me to go to the terminal cancer word. And I said, Okay. Remember in the episode on autonomic healing activation, how I talked about the central role of the enteric nervous system, the part of the brain in the gut and its instrumental role in homeostasis?
Ruth Lorensson:Yeah.
Tom Pals:Well, the one experience I can recall vividly from that chaplaincy experience was when I walked onto the ward and went to a patient's room, I'd spent many hours with that patient as they came to terms with an imminent death. To make things even more intense. We were to do what we what were called verbatims for the training. A verbatim was what a student Chaplain wrote up after a session with a patient where as much as possible, you reconstructed word for word verbatim, what was said, Imagine trying to reconstruct a 30 to 60 minute conversation word for work. I had been seeing this patient once a week or more for many weeks. And when I approached the patient's room, it was empty. The room had been cleaned and made up. So I went to the nurse's station and asked where he had been moved to. and was told that he had died in the night. And I had a visceral reaction to the loss, the viscera are your internal organs, and it was literally like being kicked in the gut or punched in the gut.
Ruth Lorensson:Yeah.Wow. That's such a difficult space to navigate Tom. And this was this was in your early 20s. right?
Tom Pals:Right. Yeah.
Ruth Lorensson:So even there, you're experiencing this physical manifestation really, fight and flight, like being kicked in the gut.
Tom Pals:Profoundly. Remember Ruth, I had a childhood history of repeated and varied traumas that left me with an overactive flight or fight response. Death was very real. I had been pulled off the pool bottom when I was just a boy. And my best friend had died when his father was felling a tree and it fell on him. And I was just very young and little. Those were just some of the things. So that overactive flight or fight response was something I was very familiar with. One of the symptoms that I experienced a lot was feeling light headed, which as an adult, I'd always thought it was related to being hypoglycemic, I have low blood sugar and feeling like I need to eat something. Well, sometimes, especially when I had the flu and was vomiting, I would just pass out and that continued into adulthood. After graduate school, I had another experience at a hospital bedside during a pastoral care visit. There I was, it was a month long, where I was the associate pastor, the senior pastor was on vacation for an entire month gone, I was doing his job. I was doing my job. I had all this stress and all the rest of the stuff. And I was visiting a woman in the hospital, and there wasn't a place that I could sit near her bed. So I was standing next to the hospital bed and just the stress overwhelmed me. And at one point, I just got lightheaded and I pivoted, fell, hit my head on the rail going down, and I awoke to find medical people to be very concerned about what had happened. And this dear lady was leaning over the side of her bed, and she said, Pastor, are you okay? And I said, I think I'm supposed to be here comforting you, but I think I'll be okay.
Ruth Lorensson:So the pastor was being looked after by the
Tom Pals:Oh, yes, very much. I intuitively connected because of paitent. those kinds of experiences, my gut, with the activation of flight or fight response. A lot of people do 3% of hospital emergency room admissions are for a condition that I ultimately wound up being diagnosed with, which is related to an overstimulation of the flight or fight response. I'll talk about that in a moment. But as a pastor for 15 years, and then a psychotherapist specializing in forensic psychotherapy, I was focused on dealing with trauma, understanding the neurobiology of flight or fight, and then relax and recover, which is homeostasis and finding creative ways to support the relax and recall of cover, which was the goal of treatment. Treating offenders meant I had to understand arousal, heightened states of emotion and the escalating pattern of flight or fight and the maladaptive ways that we try to cope with it. And I talked about that episode in the episode on the tsunami of stress.
Ruth Lorensson:So you've had, you know, years of your own experience of stress and trauma, and within it really a pursuit in your career in the beginning as a pastor and then as a therapist, to figure out ways to heal. Now, I'm just curious Tom, was that like a tipping point in that journey where some of those pieces came together a bit more quickly?
Tom Pals:Yes, there was. A particular 'aha' moment came a few years before I discovered how to activate homeostasis in 2014, and was really the catalyst for that. So I had a condition, like I said, where I would just pass out, I would get lightheaded and sometimes I would pass out. And there was an episode that I had that wasn't just fainting from an overstimulation of the flight or fight response, but I was having in response to having a reaction to a medical assessment procedure that I was put under, with anesthesia. And as I was coming out of the anesthesia, I began having what are called myoclonic, spasms, and convulsions, which is a rare manifestation of an extreme condition that I was diagnosed with called neuro cardiogenic syncope, that's also called vaso vagal syndrome. And the critical difference in the experience coming out of the anesthesia meant I couldn't do anything about it. And could only observe that convulsing and twitching and all the rest of that stuff that was happening. So as I became increasingly more consciously aware of the involuntary activity in my body, I just accepted that this was healing and restoring normal function. It felt like that to me. I don't think it was, I didn't think of it as something going wrong but something going right so to speak. Like when an animal will jerk and twitch, when it is experiencing the flight or fight response as part of the normalizing process of homeostasis.
Ruth Lorensson:So were you conscious at this point, or like, so you're waking up out of a procedure. But you kind of were in and out of this state, but you're acutely aware that your body was reacting? But instead of thinking, I would imagine other people were thinking something was going wrong. Instead of thinking that yourself? It didn't concern you, you just had this sense, that actually this is what your body was doing to heal itself?
Tom Pals:Yep. I assumed for some reason that the jerking and twitching and contractions and convulsions I was experiencing, especially in my gut, were beneficial, not detrimental. And experiencing the involuntary activity as normal and healing led me to learning more about and understanding homeostasis. I imagine the involuntary activity, as you said, seemed pretty detrimental to the other people in the room. And they kept me overnight for further assessment to determine that what I had experienced was not an epileptic seizure. But I didn't experience it, I didn't think of it as detrimental. To me it was normalizing and restorative and just a natural part of homeostasis. I was given the diagnosis of neuro cardiogenic syncope the next day and was released.
Ruth Lorensson:Wow, that's quite the event. Quite the event indeed,
Tom Pals:Yeah. Having the diagnosis of neuro cardiogenic syncope, which is also known as vaso, vagal, syncope, the vagus nerve. And I wanted to understand more of the neurobiology of the trauma response. Remember, in the episode I talked about the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system and interoception? Well it was because of that experience in the hospital that I went down that trail.
Ruth Lorensson:Wow. So this is really significant experience that you had in the hospital, you know, not standing alone, really, because this is like, there's continued episodes of this before that.
Tom Pals:Yeah. It was just a piece of the puzzle. But a really significant piece.
Ruth Lorensson:So a really significant thing happened, which kind of got you thinking, what so what happened from that, like, what did that send you into in terms of like, thinking or research or?
Tom Pals:Yeah, it fundamentally changed the way I was thinking about the involuntary flight or fight response. Instead of thinking about the involuntary neurobiological activity as detrimental, and an indication of something unhealthy, I began to appreciate the beneficial impact that was actually having. So the jigsaw puzzle pieces were fitting together, and a picture was emerging, a picture of how it was possible to activate to allow the brain to naturally restore normal function when stress and trauma had been triggered. So the jigsaw puzzle pieces of stress and trauma, were forming a picture I recognized and was very familiar with personally and professionally, as finally understanding what was happening and why it was happening, homeostasis, and even how and why I was aware that it was happening, interoception, then it was a matter of figuring out how to initiate it happening and facilitate it continuing.
Ruth Lorensson:So let me just interrupt you. With the incident in the hospital, what you were experiencing was interoception.
Tom Pals:Yes, that's how I knew and was aware. That's in that episode previously.
Ruth Lorensson:Yeah.
Tom Pals:Sensing what your body is doing is interoception.
Ruth Lorensson:And you had like an acute experience of that? Probably not many of us will have, but it was so sharp, that it sent you into this exploration. Yeah interesting.
Tom Pals:So I was looking for a protocol, a process that would initiate homeostasis, and allow it to continue to normalization, moral learning and diving into the neuroscience and exploring different interventions that were somatic, not cognitive. Somatic is from the Greek word for the body, Soma. So I want to add a word about pain and discomfort at this point, because that's what I had experienced. And because it has been instrumental in developing AHA. As I've said it many times before, to myself and to clients, there isn't a way to heal, let alone live without experiencing some pain. It's just a question of allowing the pain to be productive in our lives. And if we don't let it be productive, then it will simply be increasingly unproductive pain.
Ruth Lorensson:I love that, Tom, that's so good. I actually think that is so important for us to hear and learn. You know, so often, our impulse is to flee from pain isn't it? None of us like it. But actually, if we just flee from it, or avoid it, or bury it, or try to control it, it just leaves it as unproductive pain. What a waste. You know, whereas actually, if we use pain in a productive way, it leads to healing. I mean, that is really good.
Tom Pals:Yeah. So you see what I was wanting was not something that could be done to the brain and the body to restore and heal it from stress and trauma. But something that allowed the brain and body to do that without interference, like my brain and body had done in the aftermath of the trauma of that medical procedure. "AHA"
Ruth Lorensson:That was your aha moment.
Tom Pals:That was one of them. Yes.
Ruth Lorensson:Okay. So tell us here and I just want us to share because I know you've shared with me in the past and, and it's it's been fascinating to hear these these times. But you've told me before how you've, you, you know, in those early days you just experimented, on AHA. You had to like it wasn't anything.
Tom Pals:On myself.
Ruth Lorensson:Yeah. Which is why I want you to share it because I find it funny and fascinating. But would you share a little bit about those early days of AHA what that looked like for you.
Tom Pals:Sure.
Ruth Lorensson:And you're not a madman.
Tom Pals:No, no, although I sometimes question that. So, in the beginning, I just started experimenting on myself, I was finding a way to facilitate that with my own body in a way that initiated it. T he how to initiate homeostasis I finally knew was in the gut. It had been there all along, all those times the neuro cardiogenic syncope had been happening, especially in my gut, and most consistently, showing up with the vomiting and passing out. I was understanding as healing. My body didn't want all that stress and trauma in my body, my brain didn't want it there. And it was getting it out and getting rid of it. So without going into the details, I experimented on my own body, particularly my gut, I tried different ways to get my gut to react in a homeostatic way. And I finally hit on a particular way of manipulating my gut that consistently generated the familiar homeostatic activity.
Ruth Lorensson:Wow.
Tom Pals:So using the sense of interoception, focusing my attention on sensing what was naturally happening in my body, I realized that rather than trying to do a lot of things to it, it was just like finding a switch, and then just letting it go. And sensing it. So the itching, twitching, tingling, the changes in breathing, changes in body temperature, and many other things, allowed me to learn not only how to activate it, but more importantly, how to not interfere with it. And with a lot of trial and error, I developed a process that consistently allowed homeostasis to start and complete. For me personally, I have some clients who have been I had some clients who had been working with me for years. And they find a lot of benefit from connecting with me periodically for personal growth, and to find out what I've been creating is the terms of new ideas and ways to deal with issues.
Ruth Lorensson:They know you well.
Tom Pals:Yeah. And I remember meeting was one woman who asked me if I had come up with anything new. And I told her about a way I was working on to normalize stress and trauma by letting the brain and body do these involuntary activities. And she asked if she could do it. And with informed consent, I did it with her too. And she told some other people about it, and they did as well. And then the same thing happened with some other clients who were like her interested in new things I was coming up with. And you know, the idea, one person tells another person who tells another person, and so on, and so on, and so on. And so well, some of those were therapists who saw the results with their clients and wanted to experience it themselves. I made changes to the protocol over the first couple of years, refining it from 2014 to late 2015. And settled on the current protocol. It was at the encouragement of a couple of therapists that I had done the treatment with to give it a name, and came up with autonomic homeostasis activation. As I've said, I changed that autonomic healing activation and one of those therapists became a practitioner, and is regularly doing it himself with clients.
Ruth Lorensson:Wow. Thanks for sharing all that, it's fascinating Tom. I love hearing about those early days, it's incredible. And what's incredible now, obviously, is that you know, like you said, mentioned in a previous episode, you've done this now with almost about 1000 people.
Tom Pals:Yeah, yeah. I do 100 to 200 of them a year. And it's all people who have known somebody who did it. Then they heard about it and said, I want to do that. So for those who may not have listened to the episode on autonomic healing activation, it may be beneficial to share again, that AHA isn't just about somatic homeostasis. As human beings, we aren't just a body, we also have a mind and spirit. And all three can be and are negatively impacted by stress and trauma, especially when that is not normalized to a state of homeostasis. When it comes to the mind, as far back as 2006 or seven, I began noticing that there was a very consistent and predictable pattern in the way we think. And I started exploring that with clients and adopted it as a part of the way I was doing cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. It was allowing clients to gain significant insight into patterns of thinking and behaving that facilitated personal change. It's so predictable and consistent that I could have clients just talk about an issue, and then use four different colored highlighters to reveal a repeating pattern of the fundamental perceptions.
Ruth Lorensson:Yeah, I mean, I've experienced this with you. And I, it's one, it's one of the, we're gonna unpack this as the podcast, because it is so fascinating. But I love that cognitive way in which we're kind of acknowledging these patterns and bringing homeostasis in that space too. So love that. And then what happens after that, too, because it wasn't just the cognitive, right?
Tom Pals:Yep. So after I settled on the current protocol, and was seeing consistent results in the normalization of somatic stress, I wondered in 2017, if it was possible to activate homeostasis, in the part of the brain responsible for problem solving and decision making. Yes, the prefrontal cortex. And in psycho forensic psychotherapy, the main focus is on obviously, because of criminal behavior, problem solving and decision making, with cognitive behavioral therapy being the predominant approach. And we have what are called involuntary autobiographical cognitions. It's an interesting thing to Google if you ever want to do that. Involuntary autobiographical cognitions, another facet of that brain function is called involuntary autobiographical memories. And you've experienced them without perhaps knowing what they are called, just as you've experienced homeostasis and interoception, without knowing what they were called. Have you ever had a problem you couldn't figure out? And then something came to you later? Or tried to remember something and couldn't? And later, it just came to you like, Oh, I know what I could do, or Oh, I remember now. Well, you are experiencing an involuntary autobiographical cognition, or an involuntary autobiographical memory, you're consciously using your prefrontal cortex, in conjunction with the limbic system functions of memory and learning to try to solve a problem, or remember something. And now being able to, you started thinking about something else. And when you stopped using your prefrontal cortex to problem solve, and remember, your brain keeps going, and informs you of the solution, or recalls the memory. And the brain is constantly doing this. The way the brain works is that it compares current sensory information to past sensory information in the form of memory and learning, or just sensory information, things that you hear, taste, touch, smell, etc. to constantly adjust to changes for your survival. So even our talking together is a function of that, as I've liked to describe it, all I'm doing and all you're doing is making sounds. Yeah, but those sounds have meaning that your brain accesses. So if I should suddenly start going, blah blag gogogle goggle, you be going, oh, great now we're done with a podcast, and we're not going to have anymore because he's lost his mind. Well, those sounds don't have meaning to you. And your brain knows that. And it tries to make sense of that and can't because it's nonsense. That's what happens. We learn, we memorize, and the brain is constantly adjusting so that you and I can even have conversations, yeah, is a function of this. Now, we could be having conversations and the tone of voice or the terminology shifts, and your suddenly sensing a threat the well being.
Ruth Lorensson:Is that why sometimes after a conversation with someone, you know, maybe even like the next day, you'll kind of remember the conversation and and maybe think, oh, did I miss something there? You kind of pick up on? Was it their tone or? And actually question what was actually going on in the conversation?
Tom Pals:Yes. That's exactly why. So there is, it's possible, and this is the problem solving autonomic healing, to activate cognitive homeostasis, and unpacking spiritual homeostasis, where there can be that normalization of stress and trauma, spiritually for us. Those blow my mind.
Ruth Lorensson:Yeah, so great. Before we end this episode, Tom, I'd love you to share, just because I know that this is incredibly personal for you, but I'd love you to share how AHA has impacted your own life. So would you share a little bit about that?
Tom Pals:I have benefited immensely from homeostasis activation in body, mind and spirit. It's really hard to know where to begin with describing it. A few things that come to mind is I don't have a flight or fight reaction to recalling those past traumas. I can talk about them without being compromised emotionally, or cognitively, not loaded down with shame and guilt and fear and all the rest of that stuff that always had come with it. Physically, my health is improved. I used to have lower back problems that never really got better. I have a back brace up in the cupboard. And I since doing this, I've never gotten it out. And and now if I do overdo it, I can recover much more quickly. I was on an antidepressant for many, many years with depression and anxiety, and I no longer take them. I don't have that low blood sugar. I don't pass out. I used to have carpal tunnel syndrome. I was diagnosed and I used to wear a brace for a while and I don't now. I used to have knee pain from way back in college. I was a long distance runner and got to where I could run six minute miles for 12 or even 15 miles. That took a toll on my knees. And the last year I ran in college my sophomore year, I was getting cortisone shots in my knees. More in the left than the right from the team doctor. And I'm not making this up. The team doctor's name was Dr. Frankenstein.
Ruth Lorensson:You know, I had a doctor called Dr. Payne once. Like seriously, you can't make that stuff up.
Tom Pals:No, you can't. So the knee pain got progressively worse over the years and made climbing the fourteeners very painful. And I'd wear a knee brace and by the time I was toward the end of the climb down, would be limping really badly. And now I don't experience pain in my knees and can just hike, which is wonderful. Skiing was painful. And it isn't anymore. I'm not saying everyone who does AHA will experience those kinds of things. But I have and I've heard many tell similar things. Just overall my health and body mind and spirit is so much better than it was before.
Ruth Lorensson:Yes. Thank you for sharing that. And there are so many other stories from others that tell, you know, the similar impact of AHA that AHA has had, like you say it's not going to be everyone's story. But I know my own story is included. You know, I had I came to you really for more of the the emotional healing I think from some stress and trauma. And I also had some many physical issues resolved going through AHA and there are many hundreds of people who now share yours and my experience of seeing AHA bring healing to their bodies. You know, I can't wait to continue these conversations Tom, thank you so much for sharing some of these significant findings, these parts of your story, and we look forward to the next time.
Tom Pals:You're welcome Ruth. You've been listening to the autonomic healing podcast.
Ruth Lorensson:Join us next time as we continue in our conversations with Tom. If you're interested in pursuing your own autonomic healing journey and want to find a practitioner, visit our website innerworkings.org See you at the next episode.