The Thinking Practitioner Podcast:

Episode 155: Understanding Disgust: What Our Bodies Tell Us About Boundaries & Connection

Whitney Lowe  

Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner podcast, 

 

Til Luchau  

a podcast where we dig into the fascinating issues conditions, and quandaries in the massage and manual therapy world today. 

 

Whitney Lowe  

I'm Whitney Lowe 

 

Til Luchau  

and I'm Til Luchau. Welcome to the Thinking Practitioner.  the Thinking Practitioner podcast is proudly supported by ABMP, Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals, the premier association for dedicated massage and bodywork practitioners like you. When you join ABMP, you're not just getting industry leading liability insurance, you're gaining practical resources designed to support your career, from free top tier continuing education and quick reference apps like Pocket Pathology and Five Minute Muscles. ABMP equips you with the tools you need to succeed and grow your practice. ABMP is committed to elevating the profession with expert voices, fresh perspectives and invaluable insights through CE courses, the abnp podcast massage and bodywork magazine, which features industry leading writers like my co host, Whitney Lowe, who is not here today, he's still dealing with the results of a wildfire that burned his property, spared his house, but still creating lots of headache for him. So send him some good thoughts. Anyway, I write for Massage and Modywork Magazine too, and thinking practitioner listeners like you can get exclusive savings on ABMP membership at abmp.com /thinking, join the best and expect more from your professional association. Well, welcome back, everyone. Today, I'm talking about something that maybe every body based practitioner encounters, either in themselves or in their practice, even if we don't often talk about it or give it a name, and that's disgust. It's one of those deep, visceral, you could say, gut-level emotions that help us sense when something feels off or unsafe, but it can also invisibly or unconsciously shape how we respond to the world, to clients, to ourselves, and how we navigate closeness, boundaries and difference in our work. So understanding this discussed what it's for, when it's helpful, when it can even misfire, can help us show up with more clarity and compassion, and to help us unpack that we're joined again by our returning guest, the unparalleled Todd Hargrove. Todd, you're a certified Rolfer and a movement educator, a longtime bodywork practitioner, and you're the author of a Guide to Better Movement and Playing with Movement. A lot of our listeners will know about your blog at bettermovement.org where you blend  neuroscience, somatics, and practical insights. Welcome back Todd. 

 

Todd Hargrove  

Thanks for having me 

 

Til Luchau  

So your recent article on disgust caught my eye because not many people are writing about it in the way you were and I got interested in the topic as a part of a deep dive into inflammation. I realized at some point inflammation was such a key factor in so many of the things that my hosting in my practice, but also in myself and in my family, and want to understand it better, and came across this idea of the behavioral immune system, and got intrigued with the ways that our behavior is part of that mechanism. And I don't know if it works two ways, but the ways that our feelings, emotions, reactions are a reflection of, or maybe influence our physiological processes as well. So in your article, you explore how that works in the body and shapes our behavior and even plays out in the social world. Some in it, you talk about being inspired by the behavioral immune system, the work of Mark Scheller and Damian Murray, who have studied how disgust evolved to help us avoid disease and danger. Todd, thanks for listening through all that. Can you start us off by saying what drew you to that idea and how it shaped your thinking about disgust?

 

Todd Hargrove  

Yeah, well, I mean, the idea of understanding why we have emotions or feelings or perceptions from an evolutionary perspective has always been like a very strong interest of mine, learning about evolution in general, I find interesting. Evolutionary psychology is an interesting topic. Just the idea that our perceptions, our emotions, including pain, I guess that's that's kind of a starting point. You know, pain is a certain kind of a perception or an emotion or a feeling we have, and there's a purpose for it. There's an adaptive value. It evolved to protect us from perceived danger and motivate us to engage in behaviors that are going to protect us, such as, don't move your sprained ankle. If you do, it won't heal and you'll get eaten by a leopard because you won't be able to move around, or something like that.

 

Til Luchau  

So pain modifies our behavior.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Pain modifies your behavior. That's its function, when we understand its function. It, we can understand its logic a little bit, make better predictions about the kinds of environments or perceptions or information that's going to modify the pain, and we can understand a little bit about why chronic pain happens and why it's going on for too long. You know, we might surmise that it's the system isn't functioning as it should. Something's gone wrong. So I think that understanding the function of emotions is is really important for kind of getting a better idea of, you know, why that emotions being activated, and how to help with it.

 

Til Luchau  

So how? So, how should we define it up front here? What is disgust?

 

Todd Hargrove  

Disgust? Well, it seems like the function of disgust is, as you said, it's part of the behavioral immune system. So inflammation is part of what's fighting infections. Microscopic infections get inside the body, fights them. Behavioral immune system is trying to get you to involve, get involved in behaviors that keeps you away from the infections in the first place and make sure that they don't get inside your body in the first place. And the way it manifests is a feeling of aversion from stimuli that indicate the likelihood of microbes that can infect you. So when we're disgusted, there's a certain feeling everyone gets a certain look on their face that's kind of consistent across cultures. Different people are disgusted by different things across cultures and across individuals, but there's certain things that everyone tends to be disgusted by, such as rotting meat, carcasses, animals or insects that often carry disease, bodily fluids, visible signs of infection. So everybody tends to be aversive towards those things you're engaging in, behavior that keeps you away. And one of the one of the interesting things about it is that you want a response that will keep you completely away from this stimulus. The thing about infections is even the tiniest exposure to them in a microscopic amount or an invisible amount can be deadly to you. So you want a behavior that's like, I don't want even the tiniest bit of this thing. I want to stay away from it as far as possible. 

 

Til Luchau  

So the common, common thing in all those discussed examples you mentioned, being the potential for infection.

 

Todd Hargrove  

The potential for infection. Infection is a special kind of danger to humans. It's invisible, so we need a behavior that's like, I want to get as far away from that as possible. It's not this, everything's okay in moderation, type of an attitude which we might normally have,

 

Til Luchau  

which we could have used during Covid, but didn't find anywhere, because perhaps we were collectively experiencing this reaction, who knows, maybe another time.

 

Todd Hargrove  

It's a perfect example. Covid inspires you and so there's a rational basis for this reaction. There is a reason we, all animals, even primitive ones, have this kind of innate aversion to things and staying away from them in any amount at all. But because it's such a primitive neural structure, it becomes the building block for other types of emotions and perceptions and activities where this becomes, maybe not so adaptive, you can start to apply these ideas of purity, the the the psychologist Jonathan Haidt thinks that our innate capacity to feel disgust starts getting involved in moral considerations, like in groups and out groups, ideas of purity and ritual and cleanliness that get involved in religion. That's why it's an especially interesting topic.

 

Til Luchau  

His book, The Righteous Mind, was really a good read and a great introduction to that kind of way of thinking.

 

Todd Hargrove  

That was the what introduced me to it, his moral foundations, theories, all of these ethical ideas we have kind of boiled down to these basic, fundamental, innate psychological orientations we have.

 

Til Luchau  

 and might be physiological in this case too, 

 

Todd Hargrove  

almost physiological as well. Yeah.

 

Til Luchau  

Okay, so why do some people seem more easily disgusted than others? Or why are some things disgusting and some not?

 

Todd Hargrove  

Well, there's this, you know, pretty much everyone's disgusted by, you know, those kind of four or five categories of stimuli that I mentioned, like the rotting meat and the carcasses and things like that. But you can start to develop these kind of idea systems and cultural ideas which are kind of applying the digust idea to different consideration. So there's a lot of religions that have food purity laws. So this idea that some things are impure starts to get involved in the way they eat, in their diets. It kind of makes sense that you that diet would be an especially connected idea to this behavioral immune response. When I was part of what got me interested in this idea discussed as well, was when I used to read a lot about nutrition online, in the 2000s and all these nutrition blogs, I noticed people are very, very sensitive about this issue, the idea that a certain kind of food is toxic or impure, people get the idea that you need to avoid this food completely, and that even ingesting the smallest amounts of it can have these huge destructive effects on health. Different people would disagree on which foods are toxic, but these groups would have a very hard time talking with each other, these powerfully irrational, tribalistic responses to you should never eat meat, or you should never eat gluten, or you should never eat sugar, or you should never eat seed oils. You know, in nutrition, the idea, pretty good idea is that everything in moderation, but many nutritional camps are like no, some things cannot be had in moderation at all. You need to avoid these things completely, almost like you'd be infected by it.

 

Til Luchau  

Okay, we've mentioned Covid, we've mentioned religion, we've mentioned nutrition, all hot button issues, we might as well mention politics and it's and with all respect to the perspective that each of us have really and then, including mine, that is biased and limited. I don't remember if it was John Haight or someone discussing his work who talked about how, especially on what we used to consider the left or the liberal part of our culture, that purity manifests in the realm of nutrition that we classically will look for that kind of one of his fundamental values in many places, but it tends to constellate in the alternative scene, in the areas of nutrition, And then perhaps in health itself. So that's a place where, you know, based around vaccines, things like that, where we start to really get into that idea that purity itself is its own,

 

Todd Hargrove  

purity of food, purity of the environment. It's a general concern of the left. The right tends to get concerned with maybe some cultural issues, the purity of our ethnic makeup, or the demographics and the people coming into our country, you know, spoiling the purity in that sense. So the left and the right have different notions of a purity. They get, they get applied in different ways. If you look at the vaccines, it's the the skepticism about vaccines. You can see it on the extreme left and the extreme right. Actually when Covid hit, John Haidt and others may have predicted that it was would have actually been the conservatives that would have been more afraid of Covid and more interested in purifying themselves from this potential toxin, because it was his idea that conservative ethics in general are more concerned with purity. But it didn't come out that way. It comes out with the Conservatives almost being more afraid of the vaccines than the virus or at least, at least some of them, and it was the left that became extremely oriented towards zero exposure to Covid, so things didn't come out exactly the way Haidt may have planned, but there's no doubt that notions of purity and and keeping yourself safe from infection based on behavior became an incredibly salient issue in American politics, and people were totally unable to agree with each other about what should be done. Both sides felt that their sacred values were being infringed upon, and that's kind of another aspect of disgust is that we're not like adding up costs and benefits of things. We are totally on one side. There's no amount of cost that that would, that we should pay to infringe on this zone of purity. Once you're in the zone of purity, there's, there's no infringement in there that we that we can have it all. So for some people, is needles in the arms. Some people it was the government telling them what to do. Other people, it was the virus and no, the sides couldn't talk to each other at all, because you're looking at sacred values here, which cannot be quantified. We cannot quantify those things at all. That's. That's exactly right. And with the virus, you can't quantify how much is safe to have. It has to be a zero amount. And with it, with a sacred temple or a sacred site or a sacred land, there's no amount of infringement on that, that's okay.

 

Til Luchau  

Now you're I'm sure we're offending someone already. It's impossible to talk about... Yeah, it's impossible to talk about these things without somehow making generalizations that aren't accurate or even offensive. So my apologies as a host, but I'm so glad we are talking about it, and in my own reading on this with Haidt and others, really helped me understand the landscape and the differences I encountered with people, not just in the realm of how they felt about Covid, but even the ways they feel coming in about to my practice about their own bodies, say, or the ways that students would come to my trainings would talk about their clients, about having difficulty with certain clients, or certain body styles, or things like that. It really started to help me map out like this is our innate or behavior, other behavioral immune system, in some ways, manifesting itself in our preferences.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Yeah, I mean kind of bringing this away from politics, where we're just going to offend people, and I'm not in any way an expert on that, and to something more related to therapy. If you're talking about health and you're talking about toxins, you may be activating an overprotective response. You know OCD. People with more OCD are more tend to have a higher response to discuss than other people, obsession with correct eating, you know, orthorexia or anorexia, excessive avoidance of certain kind of dietary things. It shows up less in people trying to purify their movement patterns, but it does show up with people that are extremely concerned with posture or correct movement patterns, not anywhere near as much as diet, because that's like literally taking something into your body. I have had clients who are very, very concerned with, you know, this movement is killing you, or this posture is killing you. And the idea that even tiny amounts of that, you know, dysfunctional movement pattern is going to be bad for you. And they're kind of ignoring the fact that everything in moderation, and in fact, small amounts of toxic things can actually be good for you, from hormesis, right? From the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. 

 

Til Luchau  

Tell us a little more about that. 

 

Todd Hargrove  

Yeah. So, like, you know, with like, the dose makes the poison in many cases, and the dose makes the cure, and sometimes small doses of things that are bad for you. Well, exercise. Exercise is a stress. It's a stress in the body. Too much of it will kill you, but and too little of it won't do anything for you. But the right amount of stress in the body is good. There's all sorts of stresses, and, you know, kind of dangerous things in the world that can build us up and make us stronger. There's some of them you do, like you don't want to get any amount of Covid, probably, probably, but it does build immunity.

 

Til Luchau  

So isn't part of the difficulty in talking about these things, the differences in how we feel about absolute anything versus relative anything. So absolute purity means, like, no molecules of this, or no viral particles, or knows it amount is going to be good relativism, which is the counterpoint, would say, well, we it's all shades of gray, and if we can quantify it, or put in some kind of proportion, then maybe we can manage the risk. Aren't those two fundamentally different ways of looking at things? Part of what we run?

 

Todd Hargrove  

Yeah, I think, I think the problem is figuring out which is which. I mean. You know, there are some cases where you do need to really avoid tiny amounts of things. That's why discuss got there in the first place. But it applies to, it just ends up applying to so many other situations, and it's not just discussed. It's other types of, you know, behaviors that are either tribalistic or kind of biased in one way or another, biased in favor of protecting you from a perceived threat, and you become overprotective.

 

Til Luchau  

So how do you think, what are your hallmarks of healthy disgust, which makes it healthier, unhealthier, functional, nonfunctional?

 

Todd Hargrove  

Well, I think if you're talking about something that definitely isn't I think it's definitely good to be applying that to rotting meat and other other things like that, but I think it's good to be aware of the cases where. It's really kind of driving some some some ideas where it's just not applicable at all. Like in the realm of politics, you hear people, you know, talking about impure people on the other side who are like rats or vermin, or these animals that we're all disgusted in, you know, that's obviously does a lot more harm in the world than it does good. And in the realm of trying to be healthy yourself, any sort of kind of avoidance behavior that seems extreme, that seems excessive, that seems anxious, and you're not really scaling that with the available evidence. If you've got, if you're avoiding something with extreme caution that other people seem to be doing, just fine taking it in. It's worth considering how rational that response is. I mean, maybe you know something that everyone doesn't, and you're really smart, or maybe you're getting kind of carried away with this kind of ancient, primal, innate protective mechanism.

 

Til Luchau  

Give us some examples from your article. If you got, if you can remember them, we can go look them up. If you don't, you have some fascinating examples of, again, what you're calling the irrational ways that discuss.

 

Todd Hargrove  

I've noticed that you, if you go to Whole Foods, and you you're scooping out, what is it like, if you're scooping out some of the bulk items, there's there's organic items, and there's integrating items, and they have different scoops. The idea being that, like, even the tiniest amount of an of a non organic, you know, curry will what will be a problem, it makes it untouchable. You could say, yeah, it's kind of an untouchable situation. I know a lot of vegetarians, and I totally respect vegetarians and them doing it for whatever they want, but I have noticed that some of them, just a few that I knew the tiniest amount of a meat like product, touching their food makes them feel physically ill. I know that my experience following people in the Paleo world, there can be a very, you know idea of the purity of whether or not something's Paleo. And it can get very silly where there's, you know, this is a Paleo candy bar, things like that.

 

Til Luchau  

All right, you said you had some passages from Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. I got one here who said "people won't eat soup if it's served in a brand new bed pan, or if it's been stirred with a new comb or fly swatter. You can't pay most people to eat fudge baked in the shape of dog feces or to hold rubber vomit from a novelty store between their lips. One's own saliva is not disgusting as long as it is in one's own mouth. But most people won't eat from a bowl of soup into which they themselves have spat".

 

Todd Hargrove  

I like the spit one, that rings very true for me. I don't think I'd really like to do that either, but I've constantly got my own spit in my mouth. It's interesting.

 

Til Luchau  

These are examples of how our concept of something is inhibiting our behavior of wanting in our mouth or motivating the ways we react to things. So how do we work with that? How do we work with that in ourselves? Is it just about being rational?

 

Todd Hargrove  

I don't know. I don't I don't think it's that important for me to, solve, you know, to spit in my soup and wanted drink.

 

Til Luchau  

It's maybe not hermetically therapeutic. Might be, yeah, but, or, let me put it this way, where does that get in our way? You've mentioned some tribal or cultural ways. I've flagged some places in our practices that it can leave us less open to our

 

Todd Hargrove  

clients. Well, I think in general, it's a good idea. I mean, I kind of like to study ways in which people are predictably irrational. Disgust is just one of them. You've also got my side bias and tribalism and confirmation bias, all of these, you know, biases that tends to make you, you know, preferentially notice evidence that confirms your existing viewpoints suggests that your group is the good group and the other group is the bad group. And in the realm of like, studying information about, you know, bodywork, it causes people to really attend to the new study, which validates your practice and invalidate someone else's practice, and to totally ignore the opposite kinds of evidence. So I like to learn as much as I can about those kinds of ways where humans are. Systematically and predictably going to be wrong about something, because the more you can be right about things, the more you can help your clients.

 

Til Luchau  

Yeah, and I think understanding it as a shared human mechanism, that's a work in me too, even if I see people's disgust reactions that don't make sense to me. It's a work in my own predispositions to attitudes.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Yeah, it's a kind of, it's something that's kind of like, I mean, the whole all of this stuff is so divisive and polarizes and causes people to fight that I think it's a little bit humanizing to realize that all of us have some version of this thing in the back of our minds that's driving us and it's driving us in different ways, but everyone thinks something is sacroiliac everything. One thinks something is untouchable, guys, we have some better and worse ways to go about that, but you know that there's more in we have more in common than we do differently. You know, that's another reason I like this. John heights, moral foundations idea is that as different as these ethical systems seem, there is something in common in kind of like the root fundamentals. They just get scrambled and applied in different ways.

 

Til Luchau  

All right, so I'm thinking, I'm back in the practice room, and I'm thinking, if we notice our own aversion, well, let me back up for a second. Aversion maybe is, maybe we should have called the episode aversion or something, because that's the more generalized expression of this thing we're talking about, isn't it? And as I think about the insula and super simplistic function being this in his valence, sorting to say, Yeah, want to move toward that. Want to move away from that. That's good. I like that. I don't like that. That isn't a version, just that whole class of things that we tend to Yeah,

 

Todd Hargrove  

kind of an interesting way to look at it. I mean, if you're a there are some things that a lot of people would be aversive to maybe even in kind of a disgust, behavioral immune system kind of way. In the context of body work, you're getting very close to another person you know, very close. Yeah. Now, if you're a bodyworker..

 

Til Luchau  

we smell them, we smell them, we smell

 

Todd Hargrove  

Smell them. Disgust is very related to smell and taste. I assume that your average bodyworker has gone a long way towards getting over whatever aversion is there. That's their job. That's what they've done the client, maybe not so much. I mean, I'm sure bodyworkers know this as well. So they're not going to be as comfortable. They're having some sort of a protective response when you're getting close to them. And that is something that, you know, bodyworkers learn how to deal with that.

 

Til Luchau  

for example, use deodorant. For example, using deodorant as a bodyworker, but there,

 

Todd Hargrove  

but they have an averse that even as much as they want touch and they want intervention, there's a part of them, which is reacting defensively to someone getting really close 

 

Til Luchau  

they being the client. Okay, so are there somatic or mindfulness or thought based or awareness practices that you think could shift that, or is that a useful thing to think about.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Just kind of, like going back to this, like studying the way we work in general, I think, or that we kind of look at, you know, we kind of get outside of ourselves and look at how things are working and how they're functioning, and why we're doing what we're doing. It helps us understand ourselves. It gives these, you know, it makes these irrational forces a little bit less powerful. It certainly doesn't make them go away. Yeah, I think that's what we're trying to do with meditation. But I think you can kind of do it in the more scientific way as well by, you know, with the evolutionary psychology, studying cognitive biases, things like that.

 

Til Luchau  

A cognitive approach, understanding the ways that that shapes our thinking and reactions to things. How about movement, play interceptive awareness, exploring the edges of our usual arch?

 

Todd Hargrove  

I've always kind of looked at that as a way to, you know, kind of getting towards, you know, pain. You know, that's, that's a protective thing. And you when you're playing around with movement, part of what you're doing is playing around with risky movements and dangerous movements. When kids play with movement, they are jumping off of things. They're climbing on top of things. They're roughhousing. They're basically getting pretty close, you know, how far can I go without getting hurt? How close can I? How much can I tolerate the scary emotion? And they're trying to kind of calibrate their pain alarm system to not have false alarms, but to let them know when something actually is a problem. So you come up against the border of what's acceptable and you kind of figure out where it is. And the first time you expose yourselves to; I've seen my kids go out and play soccer for the first time, and they get hit with the ball in the leg or something like that. It's this very sensational spanking, smacking type of a thing. And they don't know what that is. You know, I had a girl that was very tough. She she'd done roller derby, lots of things, but she got out and played soccer, and she gets this smack, and there's this, what the hell was that look on her face? And then she starts crying. And then within a few minutes, she realized this is completely stopped hurting, and it's fine. And the next time it happens, it like, literally doesn't happen at all. It doesn't hurt at all. Same thing with falling down. Kids are running around. They fall down, they smack, hit the ground. They look at their parents and they say, What just happened?  Am I really hurt? And if the parents go, oh my god, sweetie, let's you know, then they'll start crying. But if you go like that, I think you're okay, that they're more, you know, oriented towards, maybe I'm okay, but you know, they're just kind of like finding out, is it okay?

 

Til Luchau  

And so we could apply that to our clients coming in and telling us their body, diagnoses, stories, symptoms, and looking at us for is that okay?

 

Todd Hargrove  

Yeah, is that okay? And to me, there's kind of, like, two kinds of clients. There's, there's the clients that are doing too much and it's not okay, and they're not really noticing it. These are, like, the CrossFit or marathoners that are running through pain and just going and going and going. Or they sit at the computer all day even though something really hurts, and the the protective signal, the pain, is getting louder and louder and louder and louder. They're not listening to it, and it's not okay. And then there's the other people, then that are exactly the opposite, and they're the do too little people, and they're very overly protective. And this is just an unconscious setting in their nervous system and and they get alarm signals all the time. They're avoiding things that are probably good for them, even though it would you know, like you know they're not going for a run because they're getting a one out of two pain in their foot or their knee. And it would probably be great for them to just go out and do it and get the benefit of the exercise, and maybe it won't hurt in a week. But to me, there's there's like, the do too much people and the do too little people based on how their alarm system is calibrated.

 

Til Luchau  

That's an interesting way to put it on a continuum, or to contextualize what people need. I'm also thinking of the the ways our responses can either help reassure someone or help concern someone more, and how that's related to someone's bothered, someness, aspect of how they experience their pain, the disturbance that causes.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Can you say more about that? 

 

Til Luchau  

The way we react to our clients reports, or even them coming in and telling us about their symptoms and diagnosis can normalize, reassure, get curious, move towards it, or it can reinforce whatever fears or nocebic reactions they have already going on around that.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, the way we react. I think that the curiosity is very good state of mind, because it's it just kind of wants to know more, and it's not, it's less judgmental. I mean, any kind of a curious mind is like a I just want more detail. I'm not making a judgment. I'm just want to know more detail.

 

Til Luchau  

And it's doing a couple of other things. Is it's shifting the assessment of like I got to move away from this to maybe I can actually move towards it a tiny bit, and it's giving me a chance to discover something that might not validate my confirmation bias, something new, something novel that I didn't expect and might actually shift.

 

Todd Hargrove  

It's the right idea. It's the right mindset for the therapist, when they're talking and they're listening and they're curious about the client's problem. It's the right idea for you, as you're on the yoga mat, as you're exercising, as you're moving, you get this possibly troubling feeling somewhere that's causing anxiety and fear and things like that. And you can, you, you, you can move to a more curious state where you're not making these judgments about I'm screwed, my back is broken, my running career is over and more like this curiosity where you see in a little bit more detail exactly where the pain is, the nature of the pain. when it came up things like that,

 

Til Luchau  

We get more refined in our perception of it, as opposed to just our prediction of what's happening there. Yeah, having a different role. Relationship to it.

 

Todd Hargrove  

There's the sensory, discriminative aspect, what is it? Where is it exactly? What is it? And then there's that much more judgmental. How bad is it? How long will it last? And we and we can go there too much.

 

Til Luchau  

There you go. Okay, so maybe our field, this field, movement, education, body work, manual therapy, could be modeling or catalyzing ways of working with discuss that could actually help the world beyond our practice room. Who knows? Might change the ways that we are in the world,

 

Todd Hargrove  

or it's just a curious, interesting thing to learn. I'm there now, if I'm not, not sure how much practical value my discussed article has for saving the world, but

 

Til Luchau  

If it helps us be curious, or helps us be less reactive to our difference, that's a good thing because, I mean, at its fundamental level, the immune system is saying, me, not me, me, not me, and not me. Is the assessment, automatic assessment, danger or threat?

 

Todd Hargrove  

Yeah, not not me. Kill it with fire. 

 

Til Luchau  

There you go.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Inflammation. 

 

Til Luchau  

So, yeah, right. So if we have some other reactions possible, or other ways to approach it that might change not only our internal physiology, but maybe the ways we behave individually and collectively. Yeah, I want to stand by that. Okay, what's something, an insight or an idea or a practice that you would like listeners to try after listening to our conversation?

 

Todd Hargrove  

I think this idea of being more mindful about the ways that you're trying to protect yourself, during movement, during stretching, during exercise, during the ways that you you know, think about other people and and being, being kind of like curious of what's going on, more than judgmental, as as a way to get a different perspective on on whatever it is that's threatening,

 

Til Luchau  

that's awesome. It's been a thought provoking, interesting, grounded conversation, and I'd like how you're helping us look at disgust, not as something to be disgusted about and to avoid, but as a experience or internal signal that we can actually be curious about, learn from. It helps understand boundaries, empathy, connection, difference at deeper levels, and its relevance to practitioners, if you've made it this far in the episode listeners, you probably have found it, but it helps us realize that we encounter all kinds of subtle aversion in our work and our attitudes and our assumptions, and meeting those things with curiosity can help transform both the ways we think about things and the ways we interact with people and care for them. Todd, we're gonna put a link to that your great blog and article in the show notes. What else do you want to point people towards, or flag people and how they can learn more about what you're

 

Todd Hargrove  

up to? So I've got the blog is now at Todd. Hargrove.substat.com, thank you. What I'm doing there right now is kind of publishing an online book that is an evolutionary perspective and also developmental perspective on a movement. So each chapter takes kind of a primal, basic movement, like crawling, rolling, walking, running, reaching, throwing, and it gives kind of an account for how the movement emerged on an evolutionary time scale. For example, humans are good at climbing because our ancestors used to live in the trees, and also how the movement emerges on a developmental time scale. For example, babies learn to crawl before they can walk, and stuff like that, and then. So the idea is to kind of just understand movement a little bit better, using those perspectives, get some ideas of what's fundamental, what comes first, what how you progress and regress different movement capacities, and just to kind of geek out on movement in

 

Til Luchau  

general. Yeah, it's awesome. I enjoy the things you put out, and so we'll put a link to that for sure. ASIS exciting, this new direction you're going. Listeners, if you've been stimulated by this, or have ideas or reactions, or if we triggered you and you want to vent, send us an email. We want to hear about it. And especially how to show you. Want to hear how these ideas are showing up in your practice or your life. I'm going to do our I think our sponsors, our ending sponsor day is books of discovery. They've been a part of the massage therapy and body work world for over 25 years. Nearly 3000 schools around the globe teach with their textbooks. E textbook. Books and digital resources. Books of discovery likes to say Learning Adventures start here. They find that the same spirit here on the thinking practitioner podcast, and they're proud to support our work, knowing we share the mission to bring the massage and bodywork community thought provoking and enlivening content that advances our profession. Instructors of manual therapy education programs can request complimentary copies of books of discoveries, textbooks to review for use in your program. Listeners can explore. Listeners like you can explore their collection of learning resources for anatomy, pathology, kinesiology, physiology, ethics and business mastery at books of discovery.com where listeners save 15% by entering thinking at checkout. Thanks to all our sponsors and to all of our listeners. Come by my site or Whitney site for the video, the show notes, the transcripts, the extras. Whitney site, he'll be back with us next episode. I hope, hope you're doing good out there. Whitney. His site is academy of clinical massage.com, my site, Advanced-Trainings dot com. Do write to us with your ideas or input about the show, info at the thinking practitioner, or look for us on social media under our names til Luca and Whitney low and we'd appreciate it. Of course, the usual podcast stuff, we really appreciate it if you would rate us on Spotify or Apple podcast, or wherever you listen, because it does help other people find the show and helps our sponsors continue to support the work Whitney and I are doing. Take a few seconds now to go do that, if you would, thanks, as always, for coming by and please tell a friend and Todd Hargrove, thank you for taking the time and sharing your ideas with the world and taking the moment to again share with our listeners here today.

 

Todd Hargrove  

Thanks for having me Take it easy.