00:00:07 Nazish: What if the reason you can't think your way into peace is because peace was never a thinking problem to begin with. What if the anxiety, the reactivity, the shutdown is not a character flaw, but a nervous system asking for safety? we are exploring what it really means to heal from inside out.

00:00:30 Nazish: Welcome to Inner Peace Better health, a space where we explore the connection between mind, body and the deeper currents that shape how we live. I am your host, Nazish and today I am joined by Jason Lyon, a spiritual coach, retreat leader and the host of the Sacred Grit podcast. After years as a pastor privately struggling with addiction emotional dysregulation, Jason discovered that real change didn't come from new beliefs. It came from learning how to regulate his nervous system. Today we are talking about nervous system healing, mindfulness, and how to apply this work in everyday life, especially men and fathers who feel stuck between where, who they are and who they belong belong to Jason. I'm really glad you are here.

00:01:25 Jason Lyle: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:01:27 Nazish: Wonderful. So, Jason, when you look back at the version of yourself who was unraveling privately while leading publicly, what did you understand? What do you understand now about what was really happening inside your nervous system?

00:01:45 Jason Lyle: Well, I understand now that there was a problem inside of my body. Um, and that problem was adoption trauma. And, you know, the adoption trauma was my trauma. That doesn't mean that everybody has adoption trauma. But I don't know that it has to be some, you know, major moment in time when something happens. I, I've seen people who were born premature and had to spend periods of time away from their birth mother when they were a small child, have these same problems. So what happens when there's, you know, a trauma such as that, the limbic system, the fight or flight system, it gets turned on and it becomes hypervigilant because when we're a small child like that, we don't have the ability to access our prefrontal cortex and make sense out of this thing that's happening to us. We all we know is we've been taken away from our mother, that our attachment has been taken away. And so our bodies in that moment and our limbic system learn how to ramp up and to get what we call hypervigilant. And that carries us through our developmental years. And so the prefrontal cortex starts to develop around this hypervigilance. And we our bodies run a little hotter than other people do. So I have things such as I had weight problems when I was younger. I would get real heavy and I would I've I have high blood pressure. I've had it my whole life. Anxiety. And these were things that my limbic system had started off with, just this higher revving internal motor. And so I would have all manner of behaviors. I had addictive behaviors to

00:03:31 Jason Lyle: and sexual misconduct. And um, I had, um, Attachment problems. I would fall in love with girls and I would just, you know, lose my mind when they would break up with me, or we would break up or we would have problems. And that carried over into, you know, me being a pastor and becoming a pastor is a very, um, beloved position. You know, people would just love me and they would want to support me and be around me. And that was, you know, infectious for someone who was born, adopted and, uh, had or has had attachment issues. And so looking back on that, you know, I would have these behaviors, uh, sexual behaviors and not just sexual behaviors, though, like relationship with, you know, non-sexual relationships that would just be unhealthy. And I would think, you know, back then I would think, man, why am I doing this? Like, it doesn't make any sense that some, you know, someone just didn't call me back or someone didn't send a text message back or whatever, but my brain would go to worst case scenario. You know, they're mad at me, or they don't care about me, or they don't love me or whatever the case may be. But looking back on that now, I just know that my body, when it would get dysregulated, when it would feel any threat of detachment or any threat of rejection, it would start sending these hypervigilant survival signals to my brain, and my brain would just start looking for whatever it could to calm the body. And usually that was sex and relationships. And so, you know, looking back on it, I know that my my body was getting dysregulated and my brain was doing the best it could to get my body regulated because neither one were speaking to each other so that the brain really didn't know exactly what the body needed, and the body really didn't know what it needed. And so there was all of these unwanted behaviors trying to bring regulation, when really all I needed to do was get my brain and body connection back working, which is what I did through the nervous system work. And once they can communicate well now rational thought can govern my body, and my body can accept that rational thought and let the brain know when it's regulated. And it's just been a beautiful process.

00:05:54 Nazish: I must say. you know, there's something powerful about realizing it wasn't a moral failure. It was a body stuck in survival. And when we can see that clearly, the shame begins to loosen.

00:06:10 Jason Lyle: Mhm.

00:06:11 Nazish: Yeah. And a lot of people believe that healing is about mindset, positive thinking, reframing, reading the right books from your approach. What's the misunderstanding in that approach?

00:06:24 Jason Lyle: Well, the misunderstanding is we can't intellectually think our way into changing. So if you think about, you know, people will get depressed or people will get anxious or people will have a substance abuse addiction, you know, an addictive substance they're using and they're doing harm. And they'll say, it doesn't make any sense. People will say that all the time. Well, it just doesn't make any sense for me to feel this way. It doesn't make any sense for me to act this way. Well, if it doesn't make any sense yet, you do it anyhow, then it it means that there's something going on inside your body that is revolting against your brain. And you're right. It's not a moral failure. Um, and that's one of the biggest problems that we struggle with. You know, we see sexual sin or drug addiction or pornography addiction has some sort sort of moral failure, as if the person who is having these behaviors is somehow broken. They're not broken. They just have a miscommunication between the brain and the body and the body and the brain. And a big part of that is we have all this information that is available to us now. You know, if you back up fifty years or sixty years or seventy years, the information flow is so much slower. And we we had more control over our limbic system because there wasn't as much stimuli out there to to get at the limbic system. But now, I mean, good Lord, I can get off the phone with you and get on my computer and find any manner of things that I want to get stimulated by. And it's right there at my fingertips. So, you know, it's not a moral failure. It's, it's it's really a software engineering problem. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a way that we are being ruled by our impulses instead of us ruling our impulses. And, you know, this is as old as yoga and Buddhism and Hinduism all has this. I, I can't really pronounce the name, but it's the, the, the not doing an action and learning how to sit with the discomfort of not doing that action. So abstinence from any action, food, sex, whatever, and being able to sit with that discomfort until we can make a decision, a loving decision back toward ourself. But it sure is hard to do in this culture that we live in, where we can access all manner of information at any given moment.

00:08:46 Nazish: really explains a lot. And your insight is so valuable in this. You know, so when people say that I know better, but I am reacting the same way. What actually happens in their nervous system?

00:08:59 Jason Lyle: Well, what's happening is so if you get a stimulus from the external. So let's say I'll just give a hypothetical. Let's say that someone who was, um, when they were a child, they didn't have enough food. So they were always in the fear of starvation. And they may not have known that in their mind, but they did know that they stayed hungry all the time, and this person all of a sudden becomes an adult. And maybe they become an affluent adult, but they can't control their weight. And every time they sit down at a table, they start eating. And once they're full, they can't stop. They just keep going. If there's food still on the table, they keep eating and eating and eating and eating. Well, that's they may say, well, I just can't seem to help myself. Or they'll say, I'm so full. I just I don't know why I do that. You know, they'll say words such as that, but that they're just saying that my body had over my mind like, I, I'm, I mean complete override. I can't logically go, no, wait a minute. I'm full. Let me stop. That's because the body is dysregulated and it remembers being hungry as a child, and it remembers not having any control over that hunger. And so even though the prefrontal cortex is saying or would say, hey, let's stop eating, or maybe even they can feel themselves going, I should just stop doing this. They can't get the brain to actually connect to the body. And that's where nervous system regulation comes in. Nervous system regulation is all about teaching your body how to access the prefrontal cortex, and teaching the prefrontal cortex how to access the body and reestablishing that relationship so that when I do think, oh, I'm full, I can go, oh, stop eating. Instead of going, I'm full. Why am I still eating? I'm still eating. That's because the limbic system has hijacked the body, and you're just sitting there and gorging yourself with food instead of being able to go, wait a minute, I can just stop eating. I'm not going to starve to death. There's plenty of food. I just need to stop.

00:11:06 Nazish: makes so much sense. We can have all the insight in the world, but if the body feels unsafe, it chooses survival over wisdom every time.

00:11:17 Jason Lyle: Yeah.

00:11:19 Nazish: And So what tends to happen in childhood or early adulthood that wires someone into chronic dysregulation, especially men who were taught to suppress emotions?

00:11:33 Jason Lyle: Yeah, it's usually some kind of a trauma that was out of control. Um, and sometimes that's even puberty. So I think that there's this wiring that happens when someone has a moment to where they don't feel like they're in control and they are a child. So that could be food, shelter, relationship, that could be, you know, a child hits puberty and starts having sexual impulses and there's no one there to help that child kind of work through what they're feeling and what's normal. And what, you know is a I wouldn't necessarily say abnormal, but, you know, an obsessive behavior, someone to help that child to navigate, uh, during the years of puberty, what that looks like, if we're always just allowed to have a feeling inside of our body with no ability to put framework around it. So, I mean, it could be a hundreds of things, but I think the main point being that when we have a behavior and it could be a trauma, it could be a learned behavior, it could be just about anything. But we have a behavior that we learn when we're a child that no one ever goes, hey, let me help you learn how to control that. Let me help you learn how to put some framework around that or to get in front of it early. Especially nowadays, we have young men able to access pornography very easily instead of getting in front of that early and saying, hey, we really need to be mindful of how we do this because we're going to start a path of harm to our neuropathways if we don't have that, we're just left to run wild. And so the body just starts to train itself. Well, if it feels good and I get a dopamine release from it, well, I should just continue to do it. And so over and over and over, we start to groove these neural pathways. And the yoga world, we call them samskaras. We start to groove these neuropathways. And next thing you know, we've created a way of looking at the world that's just pre-wired. It's called the myelination process between the synapses of the brain. And we get this dopamine and melatonin, serotonin, oxytocin, all these feel good hormones running rampant in the brain. And no way to stop the loop because it's wired itself down into our autonomic nervous system. And so when we start to regulate our nervous system, we create ways to hack into our autonomic nervous system, and we can start breaking that process.

00:14:00 Nazish: well said. And talking about these emotions that people suppress, it is something that is going to be really, really insightful for my listeners tonight. Tell us when men become fathers, why still carrying that unresolved wiring? How does that usually show up at home?

00:14:20 Jason Lyle: It usually shows up at home as a dual lifestyle. So, you know, they'll become a father or a husband or, you know, they start raising a family and they certainly don't want their their children to carry forward their own behaviors. So they'll start trying to hide them. So maybe that looks like they hide cookies around the house so they can get up in the middle of the night and eat cookies. Or maybe that looks like they hide their pornography somewhere. Or maybe that looks like they, you know, have an extramarital relationship nobody knows about. Or maybe they go drinking with their buddies, but they start living this hidden lifestyle. And once the addiction gets hidden or the behavior gets hidden, or it could go another way, they could also be depressed, but they hide it. Or they may have anxiety, but they hide it. They don't feel like they can show or be vulnerable with their family, because then they're not being a true man. But the problem is that it never stays down. It's coming out. And so men think that they're playing this game where they're hiding, or they might think, well, you know, eventually I'll deal with it. Or but, you know, real men don't talk about their feelings or whatever level of nonsense they've been taught, uh, throughout their life. It's just it's coming out. So the body, there's a book called The Body Keeps Score and the body knows what it needs. And the body is talking all the time. And so for some men, it comes out in, you know, obesity, they get really large and they gain all this weight. So I mean, it comes out in heart disease. Some men, it comes out in suicidal ideations, some men it comes out by psychosis. Some men it comes out in addiction. but it's coming out. And so until they learn how to regulate and be able to rationally think through these things that are bothering them, they they can't, you know, get a hold of the behavior. They might go to talk therapy, they might go to church, they might go visit with a spiritual practitioner. They may even go on medications to try to curb the symptoms of their dysregulation, but it will not go away until they learn how to make the body whole by connecting the body and the mind.

00:16:27 Nazish: You know, it's heartbreaking in a way, because often what looks like anger or withdrawal is actually a nervous system that never really learned how to rest or heal.

00:16:37 Jason Lyle: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah.

00:16:40 Nazish: Yeah. In practical terms, what are the subtle signs? Someone is. Someone is living in a nervous system. survival. You know, even if their life looks successful on the outside.

00:16:54 Jason Lyle: It is a sure sign that they're living in fight or flight mode, or when they're living with a dysregulated nervous system, when they're inside doesn't match their outside. So if they have this person, if a man or a woman has this person that they wish that they could be, that they want to be, but they just can't do it, that is a sure sign of a dysregulated nervous system. Every human being should be able to say, this is the person that I want to be, and then be that person. It may not always be easy. It may sometimes be difficult. But if someone says, I wish I didn't have such a heavy temper, I wish that I didn't cry all the time. I wish that I could get out of bed better. I wish I could lose this weight, I wish I could start exercising, I wish I could adopt a spiritual practice, I wish I could have better morals, I wish I could be more successful if they have all these I wish statements that they make, but yet they lack the capacity to make the small decisions, the little decisions. Not the huge ones, the tiny decisions every day in their life that leads them toward that version of the self that they want to be. They one hundred percent have a dysregulated nervous system.

00:18:02 Nazish: so true uh, whatever you're saying makes so much sense. And it is going to resonate with a lot of our listeners for someone listening right now who recognizes themselves in that. What is the first internal shift they need to make before they before any external change happens?

00:18:21 Jason Lyle: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think first of all, they're going to need somebody to help them, help guide them through this. It's not something they can necessarily do on their own. And I mean I offer a free call for, you know, they can talk to me for an hour if they want to, to give them some simple tools to get them headed in that direction, because it's not just a magic pill. So there's all manner of things that I do. There's yoga, which puts us in tune with our body. There's breathwork, which regulates the nervous system in and of itself and gives us a hack down into the autonomic nervous system. There's meditation, which allows us to see our thoughts and not be our thoughts. And then there's cold water immersion, which helps us work inside of impulses and then be able to tie back into our limbic system and get rational thought around our behaviors. And all these things work together to where we have this everyday practice that we're doing, no matter how short or how long. We're just familiarizing ourselves with this regulated state in the midst of dysregulation. And then we create can create small tools that we can do during the day to regulate ourself and to find rational thought and to be able to make loving decisions. But the first thing someone needs to do if they find themselves saying, yeah, that's me. I have these, you know, behaviors that I wish I didn't have. The first thing they need to do is just learn how to box. Breathe. If that is a very beginning stage and you could Google box breathing, you can YouTube box breathing. It's, you know, a four count in hold for for a four count out hold for four. You could do rectangle breathing that whole six count in hold for for a six count out. Hold for four. This is a beginning. Start a point of being able to regulate your nervous system, and you do it for a couple of minutes. So that's a great place to start. But I would just say that anybody who has, you know, major problems, they just can't stop whatever the impulsive behavior is. I would just encourage them to book a free call with me. And, you know, they could do that on my website, the Sacred Grit Comm. And I would be glad to have a conversation with them over zoom, wherever they are in the world, and just help them get started in the right direction, whether they hire me as a coach or not. I just my heart's work is to help men find their way to themselves and become the man that they want to be.

00:20:44 Nazish: so it's just start with noticing, not fixing. Rather, that's a gentle but radical shift. And I love about that. And that's what I love about this application.

00:20:55 Jason Lyle: Yeah. Thank you.

00:20:56 Nazish: So you speak about breathwork cold pressure meditation movement for someone overwhelmed and dysregulated. Where do you suggest they begin without turning healing into another performance metric?

00:21:12 Jason Lyle: Well, that it's all about intention. So if I'm coming toward the the practices of just being a better performer than I'm missing the point. This this is all about learning how to be present. And that's why I coach is important through this process. Because yeah, it's really easy to just get in a cold bath and go, I'm just going to sit in here and grit through it and, you know, make it happen. But to start with. You know, if someone starts breathwork and they're just doing that so that they can become a better version of themselves, I don't know that they have the right intention, but if they're doing that so that they can access their upper brain and their lower brain, connecting to one another and being able to have behaviors that cause them to love themself and make small changes. Because this is not about becoming, you know, a tougher person. It's about becoming a whole human being. So if someone says, well, I'm going to start taking cold showers tonight. And so they go and they hop in the cold shower and they stand there the whole time and grit their teeth and, you know, clench their fist and just, I'm just going to do this. Well, they're kind of just creating more trauma. They're just telling their body that it's going to endure what they want it to endure. And the body always wins that war. Instead, if they let the cold water hit them, feel the dysregulation in their brain, and then feel themselves become calm, now they've started to achieve what we're trying to do. We're working in the software. We're working in the into the way that we are processing reality on a day to day basis. That's what we're working on. We're not trying to change the hardware, the physiological makeup, although that may or may not happen with cold water exposure. But what we're trying to do is change the way that we see the world, change the way that we interpret reality and access rational thought in the midst of dysregulation.

00:22:57 Nazish: So tell us when someone falls back into the old reactions, anger addiction shut down. How can they avoid spiraling into the shame again?

00:23:08 Jason Lyle: Forget it and take off again. I mean, that's the only way forward. It's called forgiveness. You just forgive yourself. Because the thing about it is, if you start wallowing in that again, you create a victim mentality. And once you create a victim mentality, Now you give yourself excuse to go ahead and do it again. The best thing someone can do when they fall, when they make the mistake, when they go back to the old behavior and they didn't want to is just take a big deep breath. Hold it. Take another deep breath and dig a little deeper. Hold it. Let it go. Say to themselves, I forgive myself and move right on and don't look back.

00:23:48 Nazish: true. You know that repair feels so powerful. It teaches children that rupture isn't the end of safety. Repair builds it.

00:23:58 Jason Lyle: Yeah, one hundred percent.

00:24:00 Nazish: Yeah, and that might be one of the most healing thing we can pass down.

00:24:04 Jason Lyle: Yeah. Forgiveness and grace.

00:24:07 Nazish: Yeah. So for for a man or anyone who, listening right now feels trapped in a pattern they are ashamed of. What would you gently invite them to remember about their that nervous system and that capacity?

00:24:23 Jason Lyle: I would invite them to just remember that they are created in the image of a divine being, something bigger than themselves, no matter what they believe that to be. But they are not alone in and of themselves. They are created perfect. We don't. None of us look at a little baby and go, oh, that baby is just so terrible. Their new babies are perfect and beautiful and that is still who that man or woman is right now. They've just built things on top of that perfection that they've gotta learn. That's not true. And by doing nervous system regulation and by learning how to control our thoughts and our mind and our body, and learning how to connect back to our truest self, the divine self that we're made to be. They can start to let go of those old thoughts that create the old patterns. It's the saying if you keep doing what you always do, you keep getting what you always got. But if you do something new, you get a new you. You know, it's just it's as simple as that.

00:25:21 Nazish: the one key takeaway that I am going to have from this conversation is that healing doesn't begin in our thoughts. It begins in our bodies sense of safety.

00:25:32 Jason Lyle: Yeah, one hundred percent.

00:25:34 Nazish: So, Jason, for our listeners who resonated with your message and want to explore your sacred grit, your work, where can they find you?

00:25:42 Jason Lyle: They can go to the Sacred Grit Comm, or they can go to any podcast platform and just search for the Sacred Grit podcast. It is on all the platforms and all my work is out there. And this is not about fame or money. For me, this is about getting the message out there and I'll talk to anybody who wants to talk.

00:26:06 Nazish: Absolutely. And that sounds so good. I will make sure to include all these details into the show notes, so that a lot of people can reach out to you. Thank you so much for joining us on Inner Peace, Better Health in this wonderful conversation. You've got such depth and clarity to the conversation.

00:26:24 Jason Lyle: Thank you so much.

00:26:27 Nazish: Absolutely. And dear listeners, if this conversation stirred something in you, don't rush to fix it. Just notice your breath. Notice your body. Inner peace isn't something you earn. It is something your nervous system learns to trust. Until next time. Take a moment. Slow down. Give your body the safety it's been waiting for.