How To Heal Trauma With Organic Intelligence Therapy w/ Steve Hoskinson
What's called the End of Trauma course, because all the things I've been describing suggest that the way we need to approach healing is not to focus on trauma, but to the end of trauma, so that we can come back into the natural resourcefulness that
Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast.
I am your host Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.
Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review. Now, let's get communicating.
Now, let's get communicating with our guest today, joining us from California, Steve Hoskinson. He is an internationally recognized teacher, author, founder of Organic Intelligence, which we'll talk about a lot today.
And he's here to help us reduce the harm in therapy and how organic intelligence can help us heal. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Steve.
Hey, thank you so much for having me on the program.
And I just really admire your mission and how much you are doing for your listeners. It's really such an amazing contribution. So thank you.
I'm honored to be speaking with you and trying to communicate somehow.
Which is what we do here. I appreciate your kind words. The welcome.
Please introduce yourself to our audience.
I do live here in California among the Redwoods, my wife with the deer and the turkeys walking by and bobcats. We're out here in the midst of nature. That helps because our program is organic intelligence, not artificial intelligence.
We're really about the organic intelligence, which means it's everybody. It's everybody who is hearing this right now. It's all of us.
And that's all I hope to do is to point us to the intelligence that is emerging within each of us and the pathways and practices that will help us feel in touch with that intelligence more.
And it can be surprising that we are, in fact, probably much, much more intelligent than we may feel.
That's good to know. But then the question is, does that mean we should all live the city and move to the countryside?
I have room for some people, but maybe not room for everybody.
And really, you know, the ways of humans living together, it's so diverse, you know, whether we're going to be in like a hive-like situation, in a high-rise or whether we're going to be out, you know, in a tent someplace or like us in a house out in
the country. The humans are way adaptable and an igloo or, you know, we are just so adaptable. And it's just amazing that we can live anywhere on the planet, practically, and another sign for sure of our intelligence.
Yes. So how did you get started on this line of work?
Steve's Journey
I was working in inner city Washington, DC for a group called Columbia Road Health Services.
And I was just an administrator, you know, working after college. And we were serving refugees, especially from Central and South America. We were serving homeless folks, chronically, mentally ill.
And I just realized the needs and the demand that was out there. And I decided to go to graduate school in clinical psychology.
But once I got there, and I realized that what I was looking for wasn't just like immediate psychological relief, but I was looking for larger scale ability to shift the dial on how we treat each other.
And really trying to figure out what is it that enables us to be kind and generous and free in the way that we interact with one another.
And so I began to delve into Eastern traditions, like in in Aikido, I had in college picked up Zen practice and moved to contemplative practice. So prayer came in there. And so it really became a much larger project.
And I left graduate school and joined the Somatic Circus, which means I left graduate school and began to study the ways that the body is revealing and speaking of its own, its own communication straight out of the physiology.
And then from that really found the way of working in which our physiology becomes self-organizing and figured out eventually, here's how we can help one another to be more in touch with and more communicative of the healing methods that help us
So, are you saying that kindness and those attributes are naturally who we are and not this mean everybody trolling others that we are becoming?
Yes, yes.
Even though we're in California, some kind of oasis from the patterns of cruelty and greed, still Silicon Valley is just over the hill.
And so, we think that our nature, yes, is that we were meant to live in tribal conditions in which the cooperation among our collective was to share everything, where the measure of a person's being was in the measure of their generosity to others
around. And so, we think that is much more fundamental and that really this notion of accumulation for the human species didn't come around until relatively short time ago, 10,000 or 15,000 years ago with the advent of the beginnings of accumulation
of domestication of plants and animals. As soon as we started food accumulating, like hoarding food, that became synonymous with survival and power, which is synonymous with things that we have today.
And when you went and studied those practices, what did you find was because you're from the Western cultures. What did you find with the differences in how Western civilization conducts itself versus what you were discovering?
Well, I'm not sure I'm qualified to speak about that. You know, the question of how the Western mind is so formed and shaped and one might say bent toward accumulation and greed and is really another matter.
You know, we in the United States, for instance, we have experienced the importation, if you will, of ancient traditions from the East, like from Buddhism and other deep traditions.
And there has been just a habit of appropriation of human aboriginal wisdom without really looking into the roots of those practices, largely by BIPOC members.
And so the discoveries that are being found are often the discoveries right back to the origins of what being human is about. When we hear from our native members, they say, welcome, we've been here all along.
You are practicing what is our natural life ways.
So and they're still living in that kind of life. So I'm Zulu. And I don't know if we'll ever go back to this, but ancient Zulu times, let's say you're going from California to New York, there were no airplanes.
So obviously you'd walk. When it's sunset, the next house that you see, you just walk in there, you tell them your tribe, your clan names, you introduce yourself, where you come from.
They will give you a warm bed, dinner that night, and lunch for the next leg of the trip. And so you just repeat until you get to New York. First of all, in Zulu culture, we don't have in our vocabulary the word stranger.
If someone says, what's a stranger in Zulu? You just say somebody I don't know. But there was no concept of the next person is a stranger.
We all saw each other as one. I don't know if we'll ever go back to that. To even us as Zulus, because we've obviously adapted to this new civilization of accumulate, accumulate, do better than the next guy.
Yeah.
Right. And this notion of polarization that says us and them. And what I believe and why I think this broadly Zulu approach is human also because it is our nature to share and to see and value another being and all of life really.
I believe that that has to do not just with mindset, not just with training, but I believe it has to do with the way the biology becomes disorganized within modern culture.
We have certainly trauma, we have massive war now with the advent of artillery, for instance, you know, warfare changed and the damage to the human nervous system just went off the chain.
And so the damage like that, I think, is preventing our system from becoming reunified not only with ourselves, but then with our neighbors, our friends, our fellow human beings, and the planet itself.
What is Organic Intelligence
So what is organic intelligence?
You mentioned it earlier, but what exactly is it? And how does it apply to us?
Thank you so much. Organic intelligence is several things. It's a way of seeing how our human biology wants to work.
What is the native way that our system wants to work? And then we practice giving ourselves the conditions of that support, so our system will heal itself. We are these self-healing beings if we have the right support.
So that's one thing. OI is an understanding of the way our physiology works. It's also then a practice of helping each other receive those signals from our own person that would heal us, so that our self-healing method would arise and help us.
Lastly, it's a community. It's a community of people that are really dedicated to providing support to other people on the planet, so that we all can come closer to enjoying our nature of compassion and generosity.
And when you talk about trauma, you say that therapy is not making the difference we were hoping it would make. How so?
What I've come to understand is that I began to look at the physiology from a standpoint of neuropsychology, from neuroscience, and from complex system science.
And complex system science just looks at the way a system is operating and sees how systems can become more self-organizing.
So one of the sayings from that system is, under the right conditions, your system can become self-organizing, which means there are certain conditions that help us be more organized, and then there are conditions that tend to disorganize us.
And those that are disorganizing, and we're talking really now at a basically just a biological level. What disorganizes us, I believe, is too much intensity, especially negative intensity, but just intensity overall.
You know, if you have a toothache one day, and then the kids are playing really loud outside, it's like, come on kids, you just really, I'm just about up to here with it.
It means that all of our bandwidth has been eaten up by trying to manage the pain, and we don't have room then for even say the laughter of children. And that's a notion of a limit or a threshold on how much we can take.
And that threshold is growable. That's what we have discovered is that the amount of processing that our brain can do, like our central processing unit can grow.
And that's what we're aiming to do and provide for people is this method of recognizing the way this our system itself is trying to bring itself greater bandwidth all the time.
And therapy then is focused on what's wrong, what the historical issues are, how we can solve problems, but it's problem focused, which means as soon as we start thinking about those, our own system becomes more intensified, even more stressed.
And so it's that intensity that I believe creates a vicious pattern of feeling worse, and then I get some relief because I understand the situation, or I get some empathy from my therapist, or I just leave the therapy room and I go get an ice cream
or something, I feel better. Technically, that's called negative reinforcement.
In psychology, negative reinforcement is there is a negative intensity coming up, and then when it feels better, then whatever condition that was that produced that worse to better, that will happen again and again.
That situation happens over and over again.
And so we become addicted to intensity, we become addicted to negative intensity, and that amplifies one of the hallmarks also of our humanity, which is the negativity bias and being more interested, like, oh, there's a problem or a little juicy
gossip over here, what are we going to talk about, bad about them or something? You know, and we are attracted to what's wrong.
And that negativity bias is amplified also in therapy that says, okay, first, we're going to talk about what's wrong and how we can get it better. But that starts off to me on the wrong foot.
That is, we are much more healed within the context of positive reinforcement, so that the intensity comes up, but it comes up in interest and curiosity and engagement and excitement. These things, and then we chillax after that.
So there is the amplification of arousal, and then the enjoyment of the de-arousal. That's a positive reinforcement frame. Feels good going up, and it feels good going down.
That is a basic pattern in our system that helps our system sync with itself and become more efficiently organized, like breathing in and breathing out. It's just like a nerve cell works and then rests.
Or the heart's pacemaker is 10,000 cells that are sending a signal of contraction and relaxation. When we breathe in, the heart rate goes up. When we breathe out, the heart rate goes down.
And all of those cycles from the nerve cell to like the big patterns of like waking and sleeping are all patterns of these up and down states.
And we have figured out in Organic Intelligence how those kinds of rhythms come back together in a quality of synchronization and harmony.
And when that begins to happen, very naturally, a system is more organized, it is more efficient, and we feel better and are more our own nature.
We want to do all that and follow that pattern. However, do we have the capacity to adapt to that lifestyle, seeing all the demands that we have in our lives, all the things we need to do? Do we have time to sit back?
Because even when they teach meditation, they say, observe your breath. Do you think, I've been going through my day, I haven't even thought about, hey, I'm actually breathing oxygen. I'm inhaling or exhaling.
Can we incorporate this? Do we even have the capacity to do so?
Yes, we do, because it gives us energy. So we have so many things that we need to do, but this kind of positive reinforcement helps us in all of our stages.
So in busy stages, in restful stages, in together and love stages, in sleeping stages, in all of the stages of our living, there are these rhythms and your system, mine, everybody's system is constantly offering us these resources.
Like we sit down for dinner and I begin to salivate a little bit. And I'm like, all right, it's coming. And there is this enjoyment.
And instead of going, oh man, I blew it at lunch today, I skipped lunch and I didn't eat today.
And rather than doing that negative cycle, I can begin to amplify the positive experiences and especially the positive experiences that are rising spontaneously.
Because I didn't say like, oh, now I'm going to start salivating, you know, because dinner is coming. But it is this natural thing that is presented.
And all I have to do then is attend and savor and appreciate and hold that for just a little moment longer.
And with that kind of practice over time, then we are sending and feeding ourselves the nutrition of the mind and the nutrition of our spirit that allows us then to be energized and more focused and maybe even more efficient and productive.
So the power of focusing on the moment, on the now, because what we do is while I'm having dinner, I'm thinking about what upset me at work during the day, and who I'm going to send a very harsh email.
So I think what happens is, as you say, we get so accustomed to the negative.
If you think about it, for instance, when you look at shows or even news on television, if they talk about an old lady who helps her community, how many people will watch that?
Versus if it's a documentary on a serial killer, now 50 million people are going to watch that.
Right, right.
Healing Beyond Negativity
That's interesting.
Right. Why is it that we are just wired to be drawn to that kind of content rather than the wholesome teacher of the year who helps kids who are struggling? Why is it that we are more viewers for the negative rather than the opposite?
I'm not sure, but it's called in science this negativity bias.
We're just drawn to what's wrong. I think the fueling of it is that negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement means that after an averse state, then comes a more positive state, and that's negative reinforcement.
When you stop an aversive state and feel better, whatever was happening then, then you're focused on. It's important as a conditioning paradigm because we have to learn to associate like drinking something with the quenching of thirst.
So I'm thirsty, that's an aversive state. I have a drink, and then I feel better and I've quenched that thirst. So it's on that negative aversive and then quenching.
That helps you recognize what's good to eat and drink and love, and that is helpful for survival. But as a way of life, it is not helpful.
It's helpful to pair Freud would call drives with their satisfaction, but it does not help with creating community, right?
Because then everybody's talking about what's wrong and who's wrong, and then we're going to scapegoat those people over there so that we can feel really good about ourselves over here.
It doesn't work as a community supportive thing or a mind supportive program either. That's one thing. I think it's part of the conditioning system of humans.
The second thing is, and this is where it comes to therapy, that the status quo of therapy is you have to go back and listen to and think about what's wrong.
You have to find the root cause, you know, what's the core trauma that you have to dig out by the root so that then you'll be okay. That goes all the way back to Freud, but I don't think that's correct.
We see over and over again in people doing sessions in organic intelligence. Here's an example. I was working with a person who had been in the Loma Prieta earthquake out here in California.
It's our backyard really. And so they had been in that earthquake and were really shaken up by it.
And they were talking about, though, living in Pleasanton, and how beautiful it was in California in the wintertime, and how there were flowers, and how they played football or soccer.
And then was at home, she said, and then you'd be on the home phone, and you'd be talking, there was a train tracks right outside the house. And she said, you'd be talking, wait a minute, just a second, the train is coming by.
And then she said the whole house would shake. And all along there, she was describing the same kinds of states that she was having when she described being in the earthquake.
So the arousal, the tears, like she had tears of joy, you know, that it was so beautiful. And then the whole house would shake, all in a positive recollection.
Same intensity, same, we would call it retrieval cues, same kind of memory, but completely different in tone and quality.
And that's how we're supposed to heal, I believe, is through that positive window, that sort of analog, or I call that old method the upside down. And this is really right side up.
And that's what we see over and over again, that we don't have to rehearse, that our system actually wants us to grow and heal, just by having these kinds of everyday conversations, where what arises spontaneously are like states of joy and
transcendence and love and being and generosity and sharing and affiliation. It just happens. That's why we think it's our nature. And that's why we think it's a better way of healing as well.
You remind me of that phrase.
You know how when something happens, they say, oh, Steve, you'll laugh about it in five years. Is it because of your association with the experience?
Because also sometimes you have people having a similar experience, but they'll come out looking at it differently, feeling about it differently.
That's right. That's right. I think that has to do with that notion of how much intensity we can handle.
So if I'm reactive, and I think this is where the Buddhists are right on.
If I'm reactive instead of equanimous, you know, like non-reactive, we add extra intensity to things, and we soon exceed the capacity of our system to adequately experience what's there.
And then the cup flows over, and then I'm yelling at somebody, or I'm writing that angry email, or something like that. I think that's what it is. I think the difference is simply our bandwidth.
And what we grow, and what we see growing in OI is that bandwidth.
You talk about spiritual integration. How does that get incorporated in what you've just described?
Well, I think that it gets incorporated, again, just because it's a realization of our nature. So the Buddhists call it Buddha nature, that our own essence is perfect and beautiful, nothing wrong.
And we can't get to that as long as we are focused on what's wrong.
To realize something essential about ourselves that we see everywhere, there is that woman who is the teacher and who helped hundreds, if not thousands of kids who came through school, you know, and it was just a loving presence and that was
transformative, you know, for a certain number of kiddos. So there is that.
And if we can successfully repeat that to ourselves a few times and maybe get some help as well, like we provide those states that are there really to bring us back to our own nature, they can come forward and do what they're there to do.
Right. I know that we've had some discussions and sometimes there's been different perspectives on the anxiety and depression diagnosis.
Yes.
Like I said, I'm South African.
So when I was in America, I found that a lot of the time it was just more common to meet someone who has one of either or both versus because I said, back home, you think, oh, I'm sad, this happened and then tomorrow you wake up and life carries on.
But I found that there was just a lot of my American friends who will say, I have this, I have that. What is your perspective on that, especially when it comes to organic intelligence?
Sometimes the danger of, are you telling me that if I have depression, I must just go outside and smell the flowers, Steve?
Thank you. Yes, that's right. Well, it would be a good idea, but people who are depressed can't get there.
That's why in our treatment, we really begin with where the person is.
So we're not trying to change anybody, because what we're doing is listening for how the supportive state from the person themselves is arising in the conversation, whatever the conversation is.
So a person may come in and say, well, I'm depressed because I look around the world and the climate change and cruelty of war and the rich are just getting richer. And what I would say to them is, you know, depression is really, really hard.
And there's another thing, which is what you're saying, which is you're also seeing things more realistically. You don't have the kind of blinders on. You're actually seeing what the situation is.
And maybe that'll give us a chance to do something different or be different somehow. Grigev said this, he was, I think, Armenian mystic. And he said, every stick has two ends.
Jung said this, like, wow, we realize the unconscious is working within the frame of polarities. The issue of polarization is we are fixated on what's wrong, and we can't see any other thing.
But the other thing is only 50 percent, or maybe 100 percent, but both are 100 percent. It is true, the challenge is true, and the antidote is true.
And all we do is we're able to hold both, and those states, when they begin to come together, are no longer in polarization, they're just in their normal interrelationship or polarity, instead of disconnected.
They become connected again, and that's physiologically the healing, and then it shows in the mindset of inclusion and acceptance.
So please repeat again for us, for our daily practice, how to incorporate this balance, this pattern of living in a lifestyle that will make us heal our biology.
Daily Healing Practice
Yes, so the one practice that I would bring in, and this is where everything took off for me, because I was a very traditional trauma therapist, looking at challenges, trying to work with the trauma.
And then when I was beginning to work more somatically, I found something different, which is instead of focusing on the trauma, or focusing on the sensation, or the emotion, instead of focusing internally at all, I began to ask people to focus
externally. I call it orientation, which is just letting the senses free into the environment. This is something we could even do for a moment. We might just take a moment.
I would invite us to take a moment, or your listeners, to just do this, which is nothing. To do nothing at all, except just let the eyes go where they want to go. Just to let the eyes free to see what they want to see and how they see.
Just however you like in this moment. And letting the eyes free to roam in whatever way they like. And just noticing if there's something that they like to see as they see what they see.
And we're just staying in the seeing channel for now. Exploring, letting the eyes free to explore just for a moment.
And then usually when we do this, I ask people what they experience, and then they say, oh, I feel a little bit more peaceful or I feel more calm or I feel settled or more present or something like that.
And it's because we are tethered into the reality of this moment more. I'm not just ruminating on all the things that are wrong and all the things I have yet to do. But instead, I'm helping the brain do its first and major task, which is prediction.
Neuroscience is really clear about this right now. The brain's major job is to get us ready for what's coming. It's not just to react and respond to what is here, but it is to look and be ready for what's coming.
And if I can get my attention out into the environment and let it be free through the senses, through seeing and hearing and tasting and smelling, if I can just be that, then I am going to help my brain do its job of getting me ready, and I can feel
more ready for what's coming. That would be a first step, orientation, connecting to the environment through the senses.
Yeah, it certainly is calming and you notice things more that you just always walk past. Like I'm looking at this statue that my cousin from thinking, it's actually so beautiful. I wonder where she bought it from.
You know, I never asked that before.
Oh, that's beautiful. Exactly. And that kind of noticing is what the brain and the system is bringing all the time.
All the time, things like that. Like a gift from a cousin, it's beautiful. And then there's the feeling of connection to your cousin and the whole family, perhaps.
That's the support that is coming to us all the time.
Thank you so much for that exercise. So, please give us the details of your book.
End of Trauma
The details of the book are all in here right now, and in the minds of my students.
So, my students are the book right now. And so, they're studying with me, and I am honored to learn from them as well. And our website, where you can find out more, is organicintelligence.org.
We certify people in coaching.
We have what's called the End of Trauma Course, because all the things I've been describing suggest that the way we need to approach healing is not to focus on trauma, but to the end of trauma, so that we can come back into the natural
Your students that you teach at the JFK School of Psychology.
There is that.
I've been to many places in teaching, and we just we teach online as well through Organic Intelligence.
Words of Wisdom from Steve Hoskinson, the founder of Organic Intelligence, helping us to heal and find the natural healing rhythm of our biology. Thank you so much for teaching us all these healing methods and for the exercise as well.
That was really fun.
Thank you, too. Thank you for the opportunity to be together in a joyful exploration.
Was joyful indeed. Thank you, Steve. Don't forget to subscribe, liberating and a review on Apple and Spotify.
And stay tuned for more episodes to come.
