00:00:06 Yusuf: There is a moment many people experience but rarely talk about. You look at your life from the outside and everything seems fine. Responsibilities handled, roles fulfilled, expectations met. But internally, something still feels unsettled, restless and disconnected. Sometimes that feeling is not about purpose or discipline. Sometimes it is about a nervous system that has spent too long in survival mode.

00:00:39 Yusuf: Welcome back to Healing Horizons, the space where we explore healing, growth, and deeper layers of human well-being. I'm your host, Yosouf, and today's conversation is about something powerful yet often overlooked. How the nervous system shapes the way we live, relate, and heal. Joining me is Jason Lee, a men's recovery coach, retreat leader and host of the Sacred Grit podcast, Jason helps men move from addiction and inner turmoil toward integrity, presence and self-respect through practices like breathwork, mindfulness, and disciplined daily habits. Jason, it's really good to have you here today.

00:01:26 Jason Lyle: It's good to be here. Thank you for having me. I really enjoy sharing this information.

00:01:31 Yusuf: So, Jason, I'm curious about the human side of all this. When you think back to your own journey from being a pastor to now guiding men through recovery and nervous system work. What was the moment of realization that made you say something deeper needs to change here?

00:01:54 Jason Lyle: Well, after being a pastor for so many years and studying theology and spirituality, and I'd had a degrees and been to the seminaries and traveled all over the world trying to find a spiritual outlet. I mean, it just felt like I was always seeking from something for something very early on in my childhood. But I also developed a sex addiction that was really ruling my life, um, and ruining my life in a lot of ways. And that culminated in me losing my job as a pastor and doing a lot of damage to my family. And so the way that I found nervous system regulation was through a man named Rob. So I was adopted and did not really realize that I was carrying nervous system regulation around in my or dysregulation around in my body. I mean, I would not have put those words to that. I had been to therapy. I had been to recovery programs. I had been, you know, a spiritual seeker for years, but I was laying on my left side. I remember it like it was yesterday, facing the wall, laying in my bed, planning my own

00:03:11 Jason Lyle: Uh, when I just decided, I mean, I had it all planned out, but I decided in one last ditch effort I'd reach out to Rob. And Rob was a man I had met working in wilderness therapy. After I had lost my job as a pastor, I worked as a wilderness therapy guide, and he was a clinician in the same program. And he had we came in off shift one night and Rob started teaching us about nervous system regulation and particularly as it relates to adoption trauma or pre-verbal trauma. And, um, that night just really made me start thinking. And so on the particular day I was telling you about where I was laying on my side, planning my suicide. He just came to mind. And so I got out of the bed and sent him an email requesting that we could have a conversation in. A couple days later, we had a Zoom call that changed my life, and he introduced me to breathwork, cold water immersion, yoga, meditation as tools of ways to regulate your nervous system. And so since then, I've kind of designed a system that I use every day that involves yoga or Americans like to call it yoga. It's the asana practice, um, breathwork, meditation and cold water immersion. And all four of those are distinct sections of what I do. And then I found that those things also worked for other men, men who who were struggling with heroin addiction, or men who were struggling with grief, or men who were struggling in divorce or financial situations that were high stress. So I started teaching men the same things that I was using and started seeing a lot of progress with that. And that is where Sacred Grit came from.

00:05:03 Yusuf: MM. I see. And something that stands out in your work for me is how often men try to solve inner struggles purely with willpower. And I'm curious, what do you see as the biggest misconception men have about strength and discipline when it comes to healing?

00:05:24 Jason Lyle: Well, here's the thing about willpower. Willpower is actually or white knuckling, as we call it here in America is actually, um, making the addiction worse because whatever addiction we have chosen that addiction, we are using it to try and actually calm the nervous system. Now the problem is the nervous system cannot be calmed from the outside in. We can co-regulate with another person for sure, and we can through talk therapy, we can kind of co-regulate with somebody. But ultimately the only way for us to regulate the nervous system is inside of our own mind and body system. So when we have an addiction and that addiction is the very thing by which we use to regulate our nervous system when we try to stop the addiction. The volume on the nervous system turns up. And so after about five or six days, we start to have even stronger cravings. And the more that we white knuckle, the more those cravings are coming on because that nervous system is dysregulated. So it's really just trying to survive. We, we kind of view our addiction as our enemy, but it's really not our enemy. It's really just a coping mechanism that we have put in place to calm our nervous system. So most men believe that if they can just get enough days sober that they'll be okay. But and that is true. They can get days sober. But if they don't learn how to regulate their nervous system and do the hard work of really changing or rewiring the way their prefrontal cortex takes in information, they many times, unfortunately, end up just like they were before.

00:07:06 Yusuf: HMM. I see. So it sounds like the body often knows something long before the mind is mind is ready to acknowledge it.

00:07:16 Jason Lyle: Yeah for sure. The body. If you think about it long enough, Yousef, we feel our triggers in our body before we think of them. So we might feel an urge to get something to eat. We usually feel that in the stomach is rumbling. We might feel sleepy. That feels in the body before we go. Oh, I'm sleepy. We might feel the urge to have sexual pleasure. We'll feel that in our body. And then we'll we'll say it with our mind. So the body is actually the beginning point where all of our behaviors originate. We feel it in our body. Now, in our modern society, we don't ever give our body a voice. We just kind of suppress it or please it instead of taking the time to be able to go, what is that feeling and what can I do with that feeling other than taking it in an unhealthy direction? So I teach men how to use tools to take that feeling, to be able to capture that feeling and go, okay, what is that and what can I do with that? That will be more healthy than my drug of choice.

00:08:20 Yusuf: Mhm. And many men grew up learning to suppress emotions, stay productive, and avoid vulnerability over time. That pattern can build a lot of internal pressure. And from your perspective, how does an unregulated nervous system actually develop in men over the years?

00:08:44 Jason Lyle: So unregulated, unregulated nervous system, the way that it shows up is in when our insides. So the person that we want to be. So when we think of ourselves, why I want to be a man of integrity. I want to be a man of honesty. I want to be a man of fidelity. I want to be a man who is hard working. I want to be a man who engages his wife. I want to be a man who engages his children. I want to be a man who reads books and understands the world. If we have all those things in our mind. But yet our actions are quite the opposite of what we want, then we have to believe, or we have to understand, that that means our body is doing something that our mind does not want to do. So that means that there's a disconnect between the brain and the body. Because if our mind, in our mind, We really wanted to be that man. Then we would be that man. But our body is in some way and somehow, for some reason, feeling threatened. And we have to get curious around that. But we can't really get curious around that until we actually get the brain and the body having a conversation with each other. So extended periods of dysregulation, we usually see that by, you know, behaviors that just men can look back at and go, golly, that's just not the person I want to be. I wish I were someone different, but they just can't find the capacity to be who they wish that they were. Does that make sense?

00:10:17 Yusuf: Yes, that indeed makes sense. You know, it it really highlights how many behaviors we label as personal failures are often responses to a body that has been under stress for far too long.

00:10:31 Jason Lyle: Yeah, yeah, it'll show up too in weight gain. It'll show up in health problems. It'll show up in, you know, habits that will cause us to have health problems. It really our body, you know, our body is always speaking to us. If we eat too much, it gets bigger. If we eat too little, it gets smaller. If we work it out, it grows muscles. If we don't work it out, it shrinks muscles. If we run, it grows the capacity to process oxygen faster and over extended periods of time. So the body is an amazing voice to tell us what's going on. But if we're never stopping long enough and I use yoga for asana practice for that. If we never stop long enough to let the body speak back to us, we really don't know what it's trying to say.

00:11:23 Yusuf: Mhm. Yeah. And for someone listening right now, maybe a father, a professional, or someone carrying a lot of responsibility, how does nervous system dysregulation actually show up in their daily life without them realizing it?

00:11:41 Jason Lyle: Usually for that guy, usually a temper. He'll usually fly off the handle and scream at his kids, or maybe be uncaring toward his wife. Uh, maybe when his kids want to go outside and throw the football, he would rather just lay on the couch and watch Netflix. Uh. He may have low energy. He may feel like he doesn't have a purpose in this world. All of those things are direct signs that his nervous system is dysregulated, because joy is the natural state of human beings. Joy, engagement. It's not, you know, sadness, depression, and anxiety. We, we have kind of started making those the norm in our world, but that's not the norm. The norm is joy and fulfillment and connection. But we've turned, you know, depression, anxiety and isolation into what's normal. But we have to choose to be able to be happy and connected because happiness is a choice and connection is a choice. And so when we regulate our nervous system, then we start finding that, oh, wait a minute, I actually can be happy. I want to be happy. And I actually do want connection and I can foster that connection.

00:12:54 Yusuf: I see, and you guide men through embodied practices like breathwork, cold exposure, and daily discipline. For someone new to this, what is this one simple practice that can begin helping a man reconnect with his body and regulate his nervous system.

00:13:15 Jason Lyle: That is a great question, Yusef. So I think a great place to start for someone who just is. Maybe they're curious, they're not quite sure if it works, but they're very curious and they could look this up on the internet box. Breathing is a great place to start. That's where you inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds and do that over and over for about Five minutes that regulates the nervous system, and you're paying attention to your breath and you're counting, and that regulates the nervous system. That is a very, very small practice to get someone started and start seeing some results. And then also if they added, you know, if they did five minutes of box breathing and at the end of that, they just did a simple five minute meditation to where they close their eyes and just paid attention to their breath. And when they felt the mind drifting, they just came back to the breath. They would start doing two things regulating the nervous system, but also starting to observe their thoughts instead of becoming their thoughts. And that's a great place to start. Um, cold water definitely regulates the nervous system really fast, whether that's a cold shower or whether that's getting into a cold bath. Those things work really well, but sometimes that's a hard start. But Yousef, if someone goes on my website, they can book a consultation call. I would be glad to hop on a call with them. It's completely free and and kind of help them get started in the right direction.

00:14:46 Yusuf: Perfect. Just like you mentioned your call. Are there any other ways that our listeners can connect with you or just if they want to work with you, where can they find you?

00:14:58 Jason Lyle: Yeah, they can go to the sacred grit dot com and all of my information's there. My email, my phone number, my, uh, you know, uh, consultation call link, any way they want to get a hold of me. But they can also listen to the Sacred Grit podcast, which is on all podcast platforms. And I talk about nervous system regulation every Sunday and every Wednesday. So Sunday, I usually give some sort of a practice. And then on Wednesday, I give how to integrate that practice into everyday life.

00:15:29 Yusuf: I see. Perfect. And to all my listeners, all these links are in the show notes. So just go and check those out.

00:15:37 Jason Lyle: Yeah. Thank you.

00:15:38 Yusuf: Is there any last message that you want to leave us with?

00:15:42 Jason Lyle: I, you know, Youssef, the last message that I would leave your listeners with is this is men do not respond very well to therapy, and men do not respond very well to going to church or having a conversation with a guru. Men respond very well to being able to do something with their pain, their depression, their anxiety, their addiction. And what I'm offering men is a way to do something with what they're experiencing. So instead of trying to, you know, talk it through or think it through, I'm trying to teach them how to move it through by awareness of their body, awareness of their actions, and being able to captivate their thoughts and weigh those against reality and get the best outcome that they can by loving themselves fully in each and every moment.

00:16:32 Yusuf: Wow. Thank you so much for joining us today on Healing Horizons.

00:16:40 Jason Lyle: Thank you.

00:16:43 Yusuf: And conversations like this remind us that healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about returning to the wholeness that was always within us. If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share it with someone who might need this reminder today. And don't forget to follow the show so you can continue exploring these conversations on healing, growth, and the human journey. Until next time, take a breath, take care of your mind and body, and keep moving forward toward your own horizon of healing.