122 Body Language & Trauma Release

"A man's beauty represents inner functional truths: his face shows what he can do." (Albert Camus) Trauma (inhibitions to normal function) shows up in our nonverbal communication— facial expressions and posture. We can read one's emotions through their resting faces and micro-expressions. Here's how to read, and modify yours from trauma to ease and confidence.

Transcript

The Ruando podcast is an exploration of the unconscious in the game of life.

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Enjoy the show.

Today,

We're speaking on body language and trauma release and we've been having some live stream issues.

I'm going to say this again.

This idea came from one of the guys in the Masked Underground Facebook group.

It was actually added to the poll.

I didn't actually understand what this topic meant at first and I asked the person who posted it.

He said,

Maybe he's on the live stream now,

He said something along the lines of,

He saw my photo,

I assume my Facebook photo,

And noticed that I had very low trauma in my face.

He wanted me to speak about that.

I had to think about this because it wasn't a topic that I felt like I had a lot to say about at first.

I did look at the same photo that he was mentioning.

I've gotten a lot of compliments on this photo.

People were like,

Oh,

You must have been whatever you look,

Whatever.

Funny enough,

I was pretty hungover for that photo.

That's not a tip from this podcast.

Don't be hungover for photos necessarily.

But it's funny that I was just in such a relaxed state.

I was in Cuba with my friend Summer who's been on the podcast a few times.

She's a photographer and we basically spent like eight days nonstop drinking rum and smoking cigars,

And that was like the last day before I went to the airport.

So I was in a totally not contracted state,

Which we will speak about in this episode.

I was not for reasons of charisma or groundedness,

But through being hungover,

I did not have micro contractions.

We'll talk about that.

This week,

A couple of things happened that made me think of this topic again.

One was that we had a men's group last Sunday.

It was the last free one.

And I remember,

Well,

There's a bunch of new guys on.

And there were a couple of moments on the call,

We're on a Zoom call,

I see everyone's face where everyone was kind of deadpan.

And I remembered,

I just had this momentary thought of when I've hosted stuff like,

Or I've been in calls in the past when I was younger,

Or even when I hosted an in-person men's group in New York many years ago.

I remember if I was in a room full of people with a deadpan look,

I would have gotten kind of nervous,

Right?

Because I was ungrounded,

I was contracted very often.

And if I wasn't getting smiling approval from people,

I thought there was something wrong with me.

So it's a fear that a lot of people have in public speaking or anything.

A lot of us,

Especially if you grew up with slave morality,

As many of us have been raised to have,

It's very,

You can feel unnerved if you're not getting constant validation from each other.

Because in a slave morality culture,

Everyone's validating each other nonstop to make sure they all feel okay.

Not the topic of this episode,

But I want to drop that in.

But I did notice that,

Okay,

Well,

I've grown and I actually can read beneath the surface of all these guys with deadpan looks on their face.

They're actually engaged and they're actually paying attention and I should not feel ungrounded just because everyone in this room is actually feeling grounded.

And it's funny because I was speaking with my buddy Patrick about my men's group last week on how I really wanted to attract a certain type of guy to this group.

I didn't want to bring in people who are unwilling to work on themselves or just wanted to complain or dump their emotions.

I really wanted to bring in men.

And I was actually asking my buddy Patrick,

Because he's one of these guys,

How I can attract,

Is there some wording I should use?

And he's like,

There's not really anything you can talk about.

It's just like when you're speaking to a man,

You just know.

I thought about that.

I was thinking about that over the weekend.

And one of these things I think is when you're speaking to a man,

A real grounded man,

He doesn't have these extra contractions on his face that an ungrounded person,

Someone who needs validation,

If you're seeing them on a Zoom call or public speaking or in a group,

A guy who feels ungrounded or needs validation very often will have some sort of contraction in his face that whether we consciously pick it up or not,

We can recognize of,

Oh,

This guy is basically supplicating.

Or to tie it into the topic of today,

This guy maybe is socially traumatized or traumatized and on some other level,

And that's causing his face actually to look not as good or not as pleasant or not as masculine.

But the other thing that came up this week,

Which really inspired me to make this episode,

Is I'm reading this novel,

A novella by Albert Camus called A Happy Death.

And it's a very nice little story.

It's a really short book.

It's like 90 pages.

And I'm really astonished at how much life writers like Camus can fit into such a small story,

Because I cannot do that.

My book is still in draft and it's going to be over 600 pages for sure.

But this book is about a young guy who basically makes a deal with his old rich crippled man to kill the guy.

He basically helps him with suicide in exchange for all his money.

And then the rest of the book,

The main character is trying to figure out happiness.

He finally has money.

He did this thing that makes him feel a certain way,

But he doesn't know how to be happy.

And this book has all these beautiful one-liners just thrown into the scenes.

And one of them is,

A man's beauty represents inner functional truths.

His face shows what he can do.

And what does that compare to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face?

And just for context,

In this scene,

The main character is on a date with a beautiful woman.

He's kind of gloating at the fact that he gets to walk around town with a woman who's so beautiful.

But then he catches his reflection and he's not beautiful like her.

But then he starts to appreciate his own face and how his face,

While he's not,

You know,

You don't typically think of a man as beautiful,

But his face shows what he can do and it shows his competencies.

And that I thought was a very interesting point.

It's one of these like poetic points that that writers,

You know,

Prose writers can drop in.

And just for,

I guess,

Thorium caveats,

Because some people might think of this as statement is like an anti-woman.

I wanted to bring up the context because the whole chapter was actually about how beautiful his girlfriend was or the woman he was out on a date with.

But we could tie the so-called magnificent uselessness that Camus mentions to like,

You know,

Women can just be beautiful,

Right?

Their beauty doesn't have to tie to them doing something.

If you want to really be egg-headed,

Which I do,

A woman's looks typically ties to fertility,

Her biological availability,

But also surplus of resources,

Right?

Like if a woman doesn't look good,

I mean,

Most cosmetics and female beauty are basically the indicators of,

Hey,

I'm fertile.

Everything from skin stuff to hair stuff to makeup,

You know,

Signals certain things to the outside world.

But a man's attractiveness,

Like,

You know,

You could probably think of guys who are not,

Don't have God-given good looks,

But people think they're attractive,

Right?

And we're not just talking about like,

He's ugly,

But he's rich,

Or he's ugly and he's confident.

We're saying like,

It actually affects how people perceive your attractiveness.

And it makes me think of my buddy Omrapani,

Who's also been on the podcast.

I think he told the story on the podcast.

I forget if I was hanging out with him or this was recorded,

But he used to be a fashion photographer.

And he used to hang out obviously with like very beautiful people,

Men and women.

And he would say how,

He's speaking about groundedness,

He was saying how sometimes very often actually he would see these beautiful male models,

Right?

Like they were like chiseled out of stone,

Perfect jaw line,

Tall,

Broad shouldered,

Handsome,

All that stuff.

And they'd walk into a room and obviously all the women would look at first.

But these particular guys or some of these guys would be so ungrounded that when it came for them to act or speak or do something,

I forget exactly the words he said,

But it's like their lady boner shrunk.

It's like the attraction just disappeared.

Because a man who is perfectly chiseled in the face,

But he can't do things or he signals to the outside world,

Like he can't be counted on or he can't be counted on to lead or fight or build or handle tension.

It doesn't matter what his facial construction looks like.

People are actually going to stop thinking of him as attractive,

Like those facial features.

And I was thinking back to the men's group thing or the thing between men,

When a guy has like a contracted facial expression that shows supplication,

It automatically almost always makes him less attractive.

I do want to say I'm going to speak about analyzing the face and like the different quadrants of the face in this episode.

If you want to really feel vain,

Make an episode about analyzing faces.

I noticed like in the last 24 hours,

I brushed my teeth and said,

Should I wash my face more?

Anyway,

Silliness.

But I do want to talk about what I actually mean about trauma just to make sure that the word trauma gets thrown around a lot.

I'm going to work off of Peter Levine's definition in a sense,

But in a very general sense for our purposes.

And this maybe wasn't what was meant when this topic was requested.

At least for this episode's purposes,

Trauma is anything that inhibits function.

So going back to the Camus definition,

A man's looks demonstrate what he can do.

Trauma then is anything that inhibits what he can do.

So any experience that you've had that has affected you,

Obviously in the past,

In a way that you cannot function fluidly in the present.

You can use the Camus definition as a man,

You can't do the things that you would normally do as a man because of this thing that happened,

Because you've had this contraction.

That is what we're calling trauma.

If we're talking about the way most people speak about emotional trauma,

You had some events when you were seven,

It jarred you,

It scared you,

And some part of your consciousness is stuck at seven years old.

It might not come out all the time,

But maybe in relationships or maybe in certain situations that trauma gets quote unquote triggered and then your consciousness goes back into child mode.

Or maybe you're humiliated in high school at 15 in a certain situation and then you reenter the situation,

Maybe speaking to women,

But then you go back into 15 year old mode rather than being fully in the moment.

This is all trauma.

And to reference one of my favorite episodes from last year on Prometheus Rising,

Timothy Leary's eighth circuit model of consciousness,

Trauma would occur on the first circuit.

It's contraction.

The first circuit was the survival circuit corresponds with Freud's oral stage.

Trauma is anything that causes you to contract so that you can't take things in in the present.

If you remember,

If you did catch that episode,

The first circuit is the oral circuit.

It opens for anything that's good.

So opens its mouth for nourishing food,

For mommy's milk,

Opens its eyes,

Dilates the pupils to take in more light.

Things are good.

We want to take in more of this reality and it contracts anytime we're trying to push things away or get away like closes its sphincter muscles,

Its mouth to get away.

And that's the whole thing of having a tight ass.

People joke about it,

But I do think recognizing the state of your anus is a great tell of the tension in your body because it's one of the first things you learn how to grip aside from your hands.

And essentially,

It's tied to fear of death.

So when we're feeling anxious,

When we're feeling anything that we might put in the category of trauma inhibiting our function,

It's somehow related to survival.

It doesn't always make sense.

Public speaking is a great example.

It doesn't make sense that you should all contract and go into a trauma response while speaking to a bunch of your peers,

But it's tied to old mechanisms that make us fear like,

Oh,

Ostracization,

We're going to die,

Et cetera.

So the point of this episode,

To put it into one sentence,

Or I guess two sentences,

Trauma and body language or trauma and nonverbal communication are covariates.

By affecting your body languaging,

Your nonverbal communication,

You can affect your emotional experience by affecting your emotional experience.

You can naturally change the way you express with your body and your facial features,

Your nonverbal communication.

I do need to,

You know,

Blake Eastman,

Who's the founder of Nonverbal Group,

Who's also been on the podcast,

He corrects me when I say body language because the word body language comes from a book from the 1970s,

But it did catch on.

The more accurate term is nonverbal communication.

But I'm going to switch back and forth because obviously we all know the term body language.

So emotions,

And if you caught the episode on physiological toughness,

We do know that it comes down to a hormonal level.

Our emotions partly get a signal of how to emote from our body,

Right?

If you did catch that episode,

Our muscular nervous system reacts to threats many milliseconds,

Hundreds of milliseconds before our organs can generate the hormones that cause the emotions that we feel.

So we do know,

I mean,

On a scientific level that these things are covariates,

Even though some of the things I'm going to share in this,

And one of the books I'm going to reference in this episode is definitely not science.

It's not,

Well,

Anyway,

You can judge how it is.

I really appreciated the suggestion of this topic because it's not something I've thought about in a while.

But then when this gentleman drew attention to my Facebook picture,

I did look at that picture and then I thought about,

Well,

For a long time I had a resting sad face actually.

Resting sad face being kind of like a resting bitch face,

But well,

A bitch in the other sense.

I always looked like I kind of had a permanent frown for a long time and now I don't,

Or now it's not as pronounced.

For many years,

Especially in high school when I was particularly depressed and into college as well,

People would very often say to me,

What's wrong?

What are you sad about?

And in my eyes,

I wasn't sad about anything.

I just feel normal.

But people always tell me,

You look sad.

And I didn't realize it,

But my face was kind of stuck in a frown shape.

And of course,

Just like the resting bitch face,

Whoever coined the term resting bitch face,

I think they tried to use it as a justification for people who look,

Or typically women who look unfriendly.

But I would argue that any resting face you have occurs because that's a face you practice.

Your face has many muscles in it.

I forget exactly how many muscles,

But it's many muscles.

And I think this is from a Malcolm Gladwell book,

I'm pretty sure Blink,

Where he was speaking about micro expressions and how I think as a psychologist,

Basically a team has basically codified all the different possible expressions a face can make,

All the different combinations and it's many.

I think it's over 100 unique,

I could be wrong with that number,

Many unique facial expressions because there's so many combinations of ways you can attract the many muscles in your face.

And any shape your face takes as a resting state occurs because you've practiced it,

Just like any muscles.

You sit in a certain posture,

Your muscles are going to develop into that shape.

You do a certain activity,

Your muscles are going to be affected.

You practice a certain face,

Your facial muscles are going to get stuck that way,

Essentially.

I mean,

It is true.

And so looking back at my face,

I could actually see in photos,

Particularly the right side of my face,

And I'll explain the sides of the face in a moment,

The right side of my face would kind of be different.

Naturally,

I noticed this because I take thumbnail images for the YouTube version of these videos and I don't really think about them that much.

I take a snap and I send it over to my awesome media person.

But then I really looked at my face this time,

Obviously,

And I was like,

Oh yeah,

The right side of my face still dips a little bit.

But anyway,

I noticed this and many years later from when my resting sad face was particularly pronounced in my mid-20s when I was doing a lot of self-development stuff,

Kind of like spiritually colored eye gazing things.

When I was in the cult,

We did a lot of eye contact exercises and something called obnosing or noticing.

It was called obnosing in Scientology where it originally came from.

Essentially,

As you look into someone's face,

And sometimes you look at their genitals,

But you look at someone and you share the obvious noticings you have.

That's why it's called obnosing as L.

Ron Hubbard,

I believe,

Coined the term.

And very often,

When I'd be doing these eye gazing experiments or eye gazing exercises with people,

People would give compliments,

Right?

Look,

Whatever,

But then people would look closer and they would often say,

Oh,

The right side of your face is bigger than the left side of your face.

And I got this reflection a lot,

So I mean,

It's true,

I could see it in the mirror.

So it's interesting that I feel very vain talking about this,

But when I look at myself in the mirror,

Sometimes my face looks symmetrical and normal in quotes.

Sometimes I notice that it looks very abnormal where the right side of my face looks a lot bigger.

And I don't know this for sure.

Obviously,

This is very anecdotal.

This is an anecdote.

I think my face looks less symmetrical or more lopsided when I'm stressed.

It's like I don't know exactly how the muscles in my face contract,

But when I'm stressed,

They don't contract evenly and somehow my face looks lopsided a little bit.

And I recognize this,

I started noticing this rather from a kind of obscure book I read in college called Reading Faces.

And I'll try to find the author again.

I remember looking for it many years later,

And it's kind of just a hard book to find.

But I found it really fascinating.

It's a bit unscientific,

But some of the observations they share I've found to be true.

And one of the things,

There's a whole book of different facts or different associations,

But one of the things I remember is that they say that the left side of your face and the right side of your face typically are different.

I mean,

Most of us maybe have noticed this on some level,

But they represent the states of your left brain and right brain reversed,

Like the left side of your face,

How it contracts or how it shows up.

The micro expressions on the left side of your face are dictated by your right brain,

Your emotional brain.

And the micro expressions of your right face are dictated by your logical brain,

Your left brain.

And according to this book,

You can analyze a person's face and this exercise they do,

Which I think is really interesting.

In fact,

If you have some sort of Photoshop,

I'm sure most of us have some sort of photo editor on our computer,

You can do this.

Take a picture of yourself straight on and make sure it's even so that your ears,

It's straight on.

And then you cut it down the middle and then you take your left side and you flip it so that you have a left left face.

You can see what your left side of your face would be like mirrored.

And then you do the same thing with your right side of your face.

Take the right side,

You flip it so that you have a right right face.

And you can see the two different faces.

Essentially,

It'll be two different faces.

And according to this book,

To the degree that you're emotionally healthy and not traumatized,

Actually.

I don't know if they use the word trauma,

But it's the same idea.

A non traumatized person will have their right face and their left face will basically look the same.

And to the degree that someone has something going on,

Some sort of dissociation between their emotional side and the logical side is the degree that their two faces look different.

And it showed mug shots from different people on how like,

Typically murderers,

Definitely schizophrenics,

Serial killers,

Serial killers was the one that they use as an example.

Serial killers have very different faces.

Like serial killers faces are typically almost opposite or totally different.

It totally looks like different people.

And typically,

The left side of one's face,

Well,

According to this book,

At least the left side of one's face shows how the person really is,

Whereas the right side shows how they want to be,

Because the left side is by the emotional side can't really be faked as well.

But the right side is how they want to portray themselves.

So with serial killers,

Their right face,

They took the right side of their face,

Flipped it to make a full face,

Looked like a normal person.

It looked like the way most of us would perceive this person if we saw them.

The left side of the face showed something,

Maybe showed like a scowl that wasn't noticeable when you looked at their face straight on.

According to this book,

When we make eye contact with someone,

We tend to look at their right eye,

Which is the side of their face that they're trying to portray,

Which I thought was interesting.

And I was like,

That can't be true.

But then I noticed it,

At least back then I was paying attention to it a lot.

I was like,

Oh,

Yeah,

I do tend to look at people's right eyes and not their left eyes so much.

Whereas when I started doing like these eye gazing exercises and like David Data,

Like workshops or tantra influenced workshops,

They often recommend that you look at the left side of someone's face.

They don't typically explain why,

But perhaps they tapped into this truth of the left side of one's face shows how they really are or shows their true emotions.

And actually,

I did this,

I think I don't remember if I told the story before,

But I had to take an art class in college and I chose photography.

And we had like three or four projects throughout the semester.

And I tried really hard on that.

Like I did a project photographing clouds,

And I spent a lot of time editing it to make the clouds look really cool.

I got a D.

I did another one on trees,

Spent a lot of time like photographing trees to try to make them look really cool.

I got a C.

And by our final project,

I was like,

So fed up.

I was like,

This art stuff is stupid or like,

You know,

It doesn't matter how much effort I put in.

I was very left-brained at the time.

But I was like,

Fuck it,

I'm not going to put any time into this project.

And I basically took a bunch of photos of like straight on mug shots of a bunch of people I knew.

And I just quickly photoshopped it in like five minutes where I did exactly this exercise where I took,

I sliced their face down the middle and I made a left face and a right face and a middle face.

And I basically made these triptychs.

And I just,

I presented it to the class,

To the teacher,

And I explained this whole psychology thing of your left face and your right face.

And I got an A plus.

And I remember being a little jaded about it back then because I was like,

I put almost no effort into this project and I got an A plus whereas I put tons of effort into those other projects and got Cs and Ds.

And I thought,

Oh,

This is proof that art is bullshit.

But actually,

I think I came across a deeper truth that art depends on storytelling.

So this is all to say that the project was interesting.

It was interesting to see my own face.

And I did this with a lot of my friends.

I think I had like 10 or 12 different versions of this.

And it was really interesting to see all of my friends who had a symmetrical face and whose faces display different things.

And I remember with guys,

Almost always the right side of their face looked pretty tough and masculine whereas the left side of their face looked a lot more innocent and soft.

And same thing with myself,

Like my right right face,

I guess I could only tell this by looking at it with this Photoshop thing.

But my right right face looked pretty tough,

Looked kind of angry and my jaw was pretty square whereas the left left side of my face,

My jaw is a lot more angular,

Looks a lot more soft,

Looks a lot more happy actually,

Which was surprising.

And it looked a lot more young.

So it was interesting,

According to this book at least,

The way I tried to portray myself on my right face was like tough and angry,

But the way I actually felt on the inside was soft and kind of innocent and happier than I actually was.

It was interesting that my inner self,

So to speak,

Was happier than the way I portrayed myself.

Another part of this book,

General thing was that the fullness of features,

According to this book,

Represented how out a person wanted to be versus contracting,

Holding the unit.

So like one example was lips and they would slice people's faces down into quadrants and point out how if someone's lips are thicker on the right side of their face,

They want to seem more extroverted or open or sensual.

Whereas if they're tighter on the left side,

They actually feel reserved or sometimes the opposite.

And they had a bunch of other things which are similar,

But I remember that being like,

That seems like a thing that we all can wrap our heads around conceptually,

That if you're contracted,

You're reserved.

If you're open and full,

You're out.

Obviously nature determines a lot of these features,

Your genetics determine a lot of these features.

But perhaps one could even argue that if your genes have your facial features be more full,

You just inherited that from your parents.

Perhaps you also inherited a more open,

Outgoing sensualness from your parents.

Whereas we can imagine if someone's been traumatized in a way that they don't feel out,

They don't feel comfortable being reserved,

Perhaps their lips become tight,

They become tight lipped,

Perhaps their face becomes less fluid.

Because when you think of something,

Let's say not with the face,

But dancing,

With physical movement,

When someone is inhibited or their body doesn't see,

Someone's bad at dancing,

Let's say,

It's like their body doesn't know how to work together.

And that's essentially what happens when someone's traumatized.

It's like instead of having a fluid expression of everything working together,

It's like parts of them have been isolated or broken apart,

Almost like your body isolating cancer cells and creating a mole.

We can think of this in terms of time,

Like your body or your psyche isolates a certain part of your psyche that maybe is stuck in the past or goes into a stress response in a certain situation that doesn't really make sense for the actual threat or lack of threat.

But to bring back Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson's model of consciousness,

I spoke about this in Prometheus Rising,

The fourth circuit is known as the status circuit or the beauty circuit,

The fourth circuit,

Which determines socialization and attractiveness and where you see yourself in human society essentially,

Based on culture,

Based on taboos,

Whether you're cool or not.

Robert Anton Wilson says that people who have a healthy circuit for imprinting tend to be beautiful.

And what this means is,

To just recap this,

People who have a healthy first circuit,

Which is their infant survival circuit,

Tend to feel relaxed.

They tend to assume safety,

So they tend to not be contracted.

We're speaking on someone who might be traumatized or had unhealthy imprinting on the first circuit,

Might always be anxious,

They might always be afraid,

Even though it doesn't make sense why they're afraid,

They're not sure why they're afraid,

Just everything scares them.

They've had bad imprinting on their infant circuit.

Someone with healthy imprinting on the second circuit,

The toddler circuit,

The mammal circuit,

They tend to feel dominance.

That's the dominance circuit.

It's where you determine dominance hierarchies or pecking orders or where you fit in the herd.

Whereas someone with bad imprinting on the second circuit feels like they don't belong to the herd.

They feel low status.

They just assume supplication.

It's interesting because I'm raising puppies.

They're sleeping at my feet right now.

And it's kind of interesting because when we're speaking about an animal like dogs,

They really only go as far as the second circuit under this model.

And I can see in my two puppies,

I have a male and a female,

They're siblings.

It's obvious the male is growing bigger,

He's becoming more aggressive.

And you can see how he's imprinting to have a more expanded second circuit under this model.

He's just assuming more dominance.

But we live next door to a slightly bigger dog who beats him up and brings him down.

You can see this is kind of putting him in a healthy zone in the small dog pecking order that we have in my neighborhood.

Whereas the female,

You can see unfortunately,

She's kind of being imprinted to always be submissive.

Like that's what she's growing up with.

So you can see how this is probably going to affect their lifelong personalities.

Just to finish this off,

The third circuit is the intellectual circuit.

Someone with healthy imprinting assumes they can understand things.

They just have great intellectual fluidity of understanding meanings of words.

Someone with healthy circuit three imprinting remembers ideas easily,

Can remember vocabulary.

Typically they're better spellers.

They can do arithmetic well.

Where someone with bad circuit three imprinting has this assumption that they're bad at math,

They're bad at spelling.

And obviously people are not bad at all of these things or none.

But this is all negative circuit three imprinting if you have this self-image that you can't understand things.

Or you have trouble understanding abstract ideas.

Bring us back to circuit four,

The socio-sexual circuit,

According to Leary or Robert Anton Wilson.

When someone has healthy imprinting on the circuit four,

This is where we have the idea of someone who's a natural when it comes to attraction.

They had a really healthy social upbringing,

So they assume high status in themselves.

They assume that they're going to be validated.

And according to Robert Anton Wilson,

They tend to develop beautifully.

Oh,

I forgot to mention the physical things.

Circuit one,

If you have a heavy imprinting on circuit one,

According to Robert Anton Wilson,

You tend to grow up vistrotonic,

Meaning kind of overweight.

Like someone who's overusing their first circuit because it's the oral circuit.

They're constantly seeking survival,

So they don't know when to stop eating.

They tend to grow around.

And they tend to be in infant mode,

So they don't want to necessarily put in effort.

They're kind of used to parent figure doing things for them.

So if you think of someone who loves to eat,

Loves physical comfort,

And doesn't like exercise,

They might have heavy imprinting on their first circuit.

The second circuit seeks dominance.

People with heavy imprinting on their second circuit tend to be more muscular because they do more things to be aggressive,

Be active.

They might have higher testosterone levels because that's the level they operate at.

A hyperbolic example would be like the football player who always wants to play football and everything's a competition.

Everything's like a fight.

That's someone who's like heavily imprinted on the second circuit.

Heavy imprinting on the third circuit,

The body tends to be egg-headed or shaped.

This person is super into ideas.

They think ideas are the most important thing so that they end up kind of denying their body.

They don't eat a lot.

They don't exercise a lot.

They might have a bigger head.

We can think of the egg head,

The pencil neck type person.

I actually have a friend who's very intellectual.

It's a woman actually and she was saying how her whole life she thought the purpose of her body was to just get her head around.

That's kind of a statement of obvious heavy circuit three imprinting.

With circuit four imprinting,

According to Robert Antal Wilson,

A person grows up to be beautiful because they assume high socio-sexual status,

Meaning they just assume they're desirable.

Maybe their family made them feel attractive,

Made them feel wanted all the time.

Maybe their social circle,

The culture they grew up in,

Heavily praised looks or heavily emphasized how you look and how attractive you are.

If you think of the girl whose mother always emphasizes how she looks before she goes to school,

Grows up paying a lot of attention to her looks.

According to Robert Antal Wilson,

Her body will tend to produce sex hormones at an earlier age in higher dosage because that's just the signal she's getting from her environment.

This goes beyond the nature part.

You can think of the girl in your class who developed curves earlier than other women or the boy whose voice became deeper.

Obviously there's a genetic component but according to this imprinting or the nurture side of it,

We can imagine someone with healthy imprinting,

An upbringing that makes them feel attractive,

A society that emphasizes looks and status and all that stuff.

Someone who's raised in very master morality way,

We can imagine that maybe their body would produce healthier sex hormones,

More testosterone than cortisol,

More estrogen than something else.

Obviously this is not a scientific idea but it kind of makes sense.

You can also imagine,

Going back to the nature thing,

Obviously looks are determined by genetics largely but if you imagine someone,

Think of a woman or a man,

Let's say,

Who's like a perfect 10,

Perfect 10 on looks.

As far as God-given looks,

They're perfectly chiseled,

High cheekbones,

Whatever,

Their jaw is set perfectly,

All of that stuff.

Then imagine this person,

Sleep deprived,

Put in constant distress over a long period of time,

You can imagine that this person's face,

This person's posture would probably morph in a way that made them not so attractive anymore.

Whereas if you imagine an average looking person,

I don't use the one to 10 scale,

But I'll say a six,

Who is raised in a way that they constantly feel good,

They feel great about themselves.

You can think about a woman who's always bubbling with joy,

Genuine joy,

With grace,

With sensuality,

She feels super safe in her body to express herself and just be,

Even if she may be her God-given looks are not,

They're kind of plain,

You can imagine this person being a lot more attractive than maybe her physical features or his physical features,

We would assume would allow.

It reminds me of,

I mentioned this in my book,

When I first interacted with a group called Mama Gina's School of Women in the Arts,

It's a book also that I recommend to women,

Because if you look at red pill literature,

A lot of dating stuff,

There's an assumption that okay men can move in their attractiveness level,

But women's looks or women's attractiveness is kind of more biologically determined,

Because it's,

At least if you look at the sexual marketplace,

The way most people perceive it,

The thing that attracts men to women are biological markers,

Less than character markers.

However,

Something that I experienced that kind of went against this,

Or at least mitigated that idea,

Was in this group,

Mama Gina's School of Women in the Arts,

It's basically kind of like a sorority,

I don't know if I made this not the way they want to be described,

But kind of like a grown-up sorority,

With this woman Regina Thomas-Hauer,

Teaches women,

Or I don't know if she's still teaching,

But she taught women basically ways of grace,

It's kind of like a finishing school for women,

Where they learned how to become charming,

How to be in their feminine while being empowered,

How to make people feel,

Make men feel like men when speaking with them,

And I remember when I first started dabbling in this community,

I met these women who were much older than,

As a 24 year old,

I would be attracted to them,

I remember speaking to a woman who was in her 60s,

Maybe even older,

Wrinkly,

Not someone who's hot by anyone's definition,

But she had this way of being,

This feminine grace that kind of like,

I wouldn't say that I was attracted in the sense of I wanted to jump her bones,

But it added this polarity to her dynamic,

Whereas even though physically she was much older,

She wasn't that attractive on an objective level,

There's something so alluring about her,

And we were flirting in a way that felt really satisfying,

It wasn't like I was going to jump in bed with her or anything,

But it was a signal to me that so much of attractiveness actually is affected by how we carry ourselves,

Not just our God given looks,

And this is true for women as well,

And this is all to say that per the topic we have here,

If you can reduce your trauma,

It actually can make you look better.

So I'm not going to speak so much about physical changes,

I think when people speak about body language,

I'm like,

Oh,

Do this,

Don't cross your hands,

It puts you in your head,

Which is not the point of this.

I do want to reference at least one thing,

Because if you search for this on YouTube,

It's a whole big thing,

And I fucking hate the name,

I think it's gross,

But it's called mewing,

You may have seen this,

It's basically instead of mouth breathing,

According to these various breathing experts,

Mouth breathing is not only bad for you in terms of oxygen consumption,

But according to a lot of these videos,

It actually sets your jaw in a weird way.

So you think of a mouth breather,

You think of someone maybe who's slack jawed,

Who's got a big overbite,

Obviously not attractive,

Where this idea of mewing,

I mean,

I really hate the name mewing,

But it's named after this guy,

Dr.

Mew,

Who basically teaches people to breathe in a way that's more healthy through their nose,

Close your jaw,

Put the tongue on the roof of your mouth,

And this supposedly forces your jaw into the perfect alignment,

Whereas someone who maybe is slack jawed and not very good looking because of it,

Can correct his breathing,

But also correct his looks in a way that is attractive.

But what I think is more interesting than doing these external things,

Even though perhaps if you're bad at breathing,

You should learn how to breathe better,

Not saying this is not good,

But these physical changes actually require awareness,

Awareness of the body,

And what we would call grounding,

Which is what I'm interested in,

Right?

Most grounding exercises,

And actually all the grounding exercises I share in my mask and archetype challenge,

They're very simple,

Right?

And then they have to be simple.

If they require too much thinking,

They wouldn't be sustainable.

They're very simple.

The challenge or the actual challenge of it is can you have enough awareness to not do these things where you contract,

Right?

Can you have enough awareness to keep your face relaxed,

Enough awareness to make sure you're breathing,

Enough awareness to breathe through your nose rather,

Or a lot of the exercises I use,

One of them that I love the most,

And just paying attention to my extremities,

My hands and my feet.

If I pay attention to my extremities,

I automatically become aware of the sensations in my whole body and that awareness forces,

I mean,

Not it forces me,

It encourages me to naturally not contract.

If you think about all of the different supposed good body language signals,

Like don't cross your arms,

Don't touch your hands together,

Don't touch your feet together,

Basically don't do things that make you small,

That's all bad body language,

Body language of a traumatized person who's more in prey mode rather than predator.

If you have enough physical awareness though,

It actually doesn't feel good to do those things unless maybe you're cold or something like that.

Like if you actually pay attention to your hands and your feet,

You could try this now,

Listening,

If you really pay attention to the palms of your hands,

The soles of your feet,

Sometimes I throw in the genitals there just for five points of awareness.

If you really pay attention,

You'll notice that it doesn't actually feel good to do these things that are supposed to bad body language.

If you just pay attention to your body and how the sensations in your body feel,

And if you're not sure how to access that,

If you just pay attention to the feeling of gravity on your body,

Which no matter how numb you are,

You should be able to feel gravity,

Feel your weight,

If you just pay attention to that,

You'll notice there's a certain way of sitting,

Of standing,

Of breathing,

Of walking that feels better than other ways.

Basically it feels best to not contract.

I spent a lot of time,

I've had back problems for a long time,

And one of the things that really helps is this thing called the Alexander Technique.

You can look it up.

If you live in a city,

There should be Alexander Technique teachers in every city.

I did this,

I did an Alexander lesson every week for almost a year,

And it totally changed everything in my body.

Like when I was doing,

When I would do Qigong and practice the Microcosmic Orbit,

There was this kind of like a dead zone in my middle back as my thoracic spine was like so stiff and fused,

And about a year of Alexander Technique,

Basically what it,

I mean,

Alexander Technique basically teaches you physical awareness.

And by just having this awareness,

I noticed that like,

Oh,

If I pay attention to my body enough and how I feel,

It doesn't feel good to slouch anymore.

Like it actually,

In order to slouch or put yourself in a weird position,

You have to stop thinking about your body,

Which is why if you notice when people are on their phones,

One of the things I hate about phones,

One of the many things is that when someone's on their phone,

All of their attention goes into their head and into the electronic world.

Their attention leaves their physical body,

And when someone's on their phone,

They tend to do weird stuff.

They tend to like do things with their face and they'll hunch and they'll crouch.

Whereas if you take the phone out of their hand and have them pay attention to their body,

They naturally stop contracting because it doesn't feel good to contract.

You have to stop,

You have to basically leave your body in order to contract,

Which brings us back to trauma.

This whole thing of trauma,

Of anything that inhibits our natural flow,

You have to leave your awareness.

You have to leave your body.

You know,

Like when we speak about like extreme trauma,

The way it's mostly spoken about,

Many people have traumatizing experiences or experience a traumatic event,

Will describe something of like,

I left my body or like,

You know,

Especially women in sexual trauma,

When they engage in sex again,

If they feel triggered,

It's like they're not in their body.

It's like they've left,

Right?

We want to do the opposite.

We want to be in our body,

To feel our bodies,

Feel our body around us.

And if we can do that,

We don't have to remember all of these body language tips.

If you can really feel your body,

Really be in your body,

The thing that feels best will typically be the thing that's best for your body anyway.

This is not always the case.

And in Alexander Technique,

They speak about how you can't always trust your feelings,

Especially if you've learned to sit in a certain way,

Or stand in a certain way,

Or hunch in a certain way.

Like,

For a long time,

I didn't realize that when I thought my back was straight,

I was actually leaning back and I was overly engaging my core,

Which was putting stress on my upper back or middle back.

You know,

Sometimes your feelings have to be trained.

But for the most part,

The more awareness you can have in your body,

The more naturally you will find correct alignment.

You don't have to think about all this stuff.

Which brings us to the end.

I'm going to share just a couple tips that,

You know,

Practical applications that if you want to actually do this,

These are some things I suggest.

I do want to reference this whole idea of groundedness.

When I think of some of the more grounded people I know,

My buddy Brian Beijin is one person,

Omar Pani,

Who I mentioned,

They're probably the most grounded people I can think of,

At least in terms of their expression.

Like they make almost no facial expressions,

But you can still really feel them,

Right?

Which is kind of the goal of most men.

Going back to Albert Camus,

Quote,

Their faces display what they can do.

Like I don't know what Omar Pani or Brian Beijin would be like in a firefight or if zombies attacked or if like shit really went down.

I don't know,

Right?

Maybe they would act one way or another way,

But their facial expressions,

The way they react,

The way that they don't overreact to things or contract in a way that is unnecessary,

Makes me kind of assume that they could be counted on when zombies attack,

Right?

Like they don't get flustered over things.

And you know,

It's possible that someone who's a good actor can maybe train the facial expression thing in a way that doesn't actually represent what they can do.

But I think in general,

The Albert Camus quote is true.

A man's looks kind of demonstrate what he can do,

Which is why when we're talking to a guy and his face is unnecessarily contracting or he's doing weird things,

You know,

We feel kind of like this disdain.

It's kind of a natural reaction.

We're talking to someone,

They're kind of like doing like they have these micro expressions of like that,

You know,

You kind of feel less trust for the person because you're like,

Well,

If this guy is unable to remain stable under this mild social tension,

What's he going to be like when shit really hits the fan?

Now,

Of course,

Caveats.

I'm sure there's plenty of like hardened,

You know,

Combat veterans who can really handle shit,

But for whatever reason they feel maybe they have trauma when it comes to socializing and they just feel weird or they feel contracted in social situations.

It's not exactly one to one,

But this is why these things matter to us.

This is what it signals.

In a less complex human society,

If we go back to the Stone Age,

Perhaps it was a one to one thing.

If a guy overly contracted in a social situation,

He probably would overly contract in a life or death situation.

Nowadays,

Maybe it's not exactly one to one,

But I have three tips,

Three applications of ways you can encourage less of a trauma response and perhaps become more good looking on some level,

Right?

It's not going to change your face,

But it will perhaps change how people perceive you and what you signal to other people,

Other men,

Other women.

The first is a montage exercise,

The inner smile.

The inner smile is a simple thing.

In fact,

By the title you could probably guess what it means,

But it's essentially generating the feeling of smiling in your body.

While you're listening,

While you're watching this,

You can perhaps try right now,

You know.

Maybe you need to close your eyes.

Maybe you can just do it where you imagine what smiling feels in your body.

Or if the idea of energy is a model of perception that works for you,

You can imagine what does it mean to send smiling energy into your torso,

Into your body?

What does it mean to smile from the inside?

I had a very brief time.

Well,

Actually I don't have to get into that.

Anyway,

I'm not going to tell that story.

I had an embarrassing time.

I did try to be a model at one point and I have embarrassing stories from that.

But one thing I did learn,

I'll say it this way,

Is that the way you look on camera,

Not to say that I was particularly good at it,

But the way you look on camera doesn't come from trying to morph a certain face.

You know,

When I try to do that doesn't work.

What does seem to work is generating the feeling from inside of your body,

From the soles of your feet out into your face or from your torso.

And I don't know,

I mean it's obviously not a scientific way of speaking about it,

But when you have that feeling come from the inside,

It somehow makes your facial muscles,

Which are so complicated and hard to control,

Somehow it makes your facial muscles come out right.

And we think about people who are just photogenic,

People who just like have that,

You know,

They can like look in a way that they're interested but also aloof and confident.

They have this way of generating the feeling.

So we look at them and even if they're,

Whether they're beautiful or not,

We look at them and we feel a certain way.

Like we feel like,

Oh I trust this person or like I want to buy the clothes that they're wearing,

Right.

This is what models are hired for.

Like they generate this feeling in themselves which make us feel a certain way when we look at them.

I would say,

Even though most of us are not going to become models just because of this,

You can practice the inner smile and generating these smiling feelings in your body and it will change how you look.

But the point really isn't about how you look.

The look is more of like a barometer of how you actually feel.

That's what I care about,

Right.

I don't actually care if you're photogenic or not.

But I do want you to feel more confident and have less of a traumatic response.

And you know,

Before I really knew about this inner smile thing,

I did something similar to this by accident.

I think a lot of people maybe come up with some version of this naturally.

When I was in college,

I would have these like really bad anxiety experiences.

I would go home and I would go back to my dorm room and I would do this,

I would call it sensorization.

That was my name for it because I was trying to really feel my senses in the body.

And when I would do this,

I would do this kind of as part of like a self-hypnosis attempt.

I was trying all of these different methodologies.

But by simply lying there and first really feeling my body,

Like doing my best to really reduce whatever emotions I was feeling down to the physical sensation,

Like really what does my body feel?

What does gravity feel like on my arms?

What is the temperature of my skin?

Eventually it became natural to kind of feel like this like interested smiling feeling,

Right?

Like if you can really feel what's there,

Keep digging,

Keep digging beneath those emotions,

Eventually the contraction drops and you access something that feels like smiling.

And going back to the grounding techniques,

I share seven different grounding techniques in my archetype challenge.

They all relate to something of really feeling and validating what's there.

Some of them aren't physical.

It's like one of the ones I use is like paying attention to the extremities of a room.

That kind of builds off of the other somatic practices.

They have to be practiced,

Right?

The actual doing is easy.

It's like developing that awareness where that level of physical awareness becomes a habit rather than the habit of contracting,

Which is encouraged when people are on the phone a lot,

You're encouraging the habit of being tight or like being not in your body,

Which in a way,

To use our earlier definition,

It's kind of a way of practicing trauma.

So maybe it's too extreme of a statement to stay,

But I do think if you're on your phone a lot,

You're encouraging trauma body language.

I'll leave it at that.

The second thing that's practicing the inner smile or practicing really any grounding technique would work.

They're all very similar to be fair.

The second technique,

Similar,

Ties into the Sedona Method stuff,

The existential kinks stuff,

Which we've been speaking,

Which is welcoming the sensations that come with that experience.

So like if you feel social anxiety or if you notice that you contract and like have submissive facial expressions or what's the word,

Validation seeking facial expressions around people,

In the moment,

You can actually practice this,

Feel the physical sensations again and welcome them.

Because if we take this premise that all bad body language comes from contracting,

From bracing against a threat,

Well,

What's the opposite is welcoming it.

Even if the sensation doesn't go away,

Can you welcome it?

In public speaking,

This helped me a lot in that for a while I would try to get rid of my jitters because I would literally shake and stutter anytime I was on stage.

But I was like,

Okay,

This feeling is not going to go away.

What if I accept it?

And then that feeling,

That nervous energy kind of became a fuel for charisma.

I'd be super nervous is again a thing that shifted for me in college.

I give these big speeches.

A lot of people would compliment me like,

Wow,

You seem so charismatic and comfortable.

I'm like,

Wow,

I was basically shaking the whole time.

But that shaking came out because I welcomed the feeling rather than fight it.

Which goes back to arousal control techniques essentially,

Not sexual arousal,

Although the application is the same.

Can you welcome the sensations in your body so you don't contract against them,

You expand in response to them and you can use them.

It does actually relate to the last thing longer in bed or using that energy transmuted for better purposes as opposed to contracting against it and feeling you have to ejaculate.

It's actually the same thing.

Same thing that makes you nervous on stage or contract in a social situation.

And finally,

Getting this in right on the hour mark,

The third piece is more of an emotional thing.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot.

It's a little more abstract,

But I think it's just as useful.

Which instead of reacting to things,

Which would cause physical contraction or emotional contraction is that whenever you're faced with something that makes you stressed,

Something that triggers you,

I think this maybe is more useful for men than women,

But can you think about what does it mean to go on the attack?

I've spoken about the whole analogy with wild dogs.

If you run for a wild dog,

It chases you because it thinks it's the predator and you're the prey.

But if you run at a wild dog,

I've experienced this walking my little puppies here in Thailand.

Sometimes big dogs come and try to assert their dominance.

If we walk away or if we run away,

They really will come and probably bite us.

But if I run at the dog,

It runs away.

Like all the time.

That's just always what happens.

Like the dog is waiting for me to tell it whether it's prey or predator.

Your fears are the same way.

The things that make you uncomfortable are the same way.

And like two places where I noticed this,

You know,

Aggression is a virtue,

You know,

When applied correctly.

Two things,

I've gotten super obsessed with chess lately.

I'm embarrassed to admit how much I've been playing chess.

But chess and jiu-jitsu,

Two things that I really love and they're both competitions.

And in both type forms of competition,

When skills are evenly matched and attributes are evenly matched,

I've been noticing this in chess as well,

The more aggressive person tends to have more advantages.

In jiu-jitsu,

Because it's physical fighting and maybe it's obvious,

But like,

You know,

If you're really good at jiu-jitsu,

You can be very passive and still win.

High level people when they're rolling with the white belts,

They can do this.

But I just got my blue belts.

I'm not quite at this point.

I thought maybe I can,

Last time I sparred,

I was like,

There's a bunch of white belts in my gym.

Oh,

Maybe I'm tired.

Maybe I can like beat them by being passive.

I'm actually not there yet.

You have to be better.

But if I was aggressive,

I would beat them every time.

Same thing in chess.

I've noticed when I got up against a person of a similar rating,

If I try to play defensive,

Even if I make the smart moves,

The aggressive person always has more opportunities.

I'm always reacting to them.

Whereas if I'm a little more aggressive,

I kind of create openings,

Right?

I create vulnerabilities where the other person has to keep like reacting to me.

Obviously aggression can go too far and you can be overly,

You know,

Anyway,

I don't want me to beat this analogy to death.

Essentially when you become the aggressor to things,

It does shift your hormones.

It does shift your body language.

The difference between a predator and a prey is that a predator is in control of the tension.

The predator has to choose to stop hunting when it wants.

The prey doesn't have that choice.

And as I spoke about in a more sciency level on the physiological toughness episode,

It actually affects your hormones and your nervous system and obviously your experience.

And we could even,

You know,

Tie this to the original statements.

Predators are more handsome.

Prey,

You don't think of prey animals as handsome.

They can be cute.

Prey is cute at best,

But predators are handsome.

You think of a lion,

You think of a wolf,

You think of a very secure alpha dog who isn't emotionally needy.

They just command respect because they're at peace.

They're in control of the action.

And to bring us back to this quote by Albert Camus,

If a man's face can show what he can do,

Then by doing things,

By being the aggressor,

It will show in your face.

It will show in your body language.

If you develop competence in something enough so that you have this unwavering confidence,

I mean,

It's the only way to develop real confidence,

Eventually they'll show up in your body language.

And while I wouldn't go as far to say that this is a cure to traumatic body language,

Obviously if you've had some really traumatic experience,

It's a little deeper than what I'm saying,

But for the typical types of trauma that most of us experience,

These contractions that inhibit us from our natural expression,

By doing things that give us an unwavering confidence,

We'll naturally be relaxed.

And I'll just say,

Like,

You know,

Competence is contextual,

But when you really feel like there's a source of,

There's something in your life where you really have learned to like yourself because you know that,

Okay,

Maybe you're a spasm,

Maybe you're a social retard,

But you're really good at your work.

You're really good at this thing.

It gives you some level of baseline confidence where maybe you don't initially have to contract around other people,

Right?

Like,

Anyway,

That's all.

Goodbye.