Ep. 74 Combining the Neubie & Traditional Chinese Medicine for Energy, Health, and Trauma Healing

Join us as we sit down for this week’s episode with Wesley Kress, a board-certified acupuncturist with a Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine (MSOM). With Wesley’s extensive knowledge and experience, we discuss how he implements the Neubie into his TCM practice.

This episode focuses on:

• – How Traditional Chinese Medicine views health and wellbeing.
• – How meditation complements the Neubie in training the parasympathetic nervous system and its benefits.
• – The combination of the Neubie with acupuncture.
• – Ways in which the pathophysiology of trauma and unprocessed emotions can be treated.
• – Important compounds in biochemistry, including nitric oxide, and their effects on energy and healing

Tune in now and learn more about Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Neubie! You can find Wesley’s work at https://breakthroughperformance-rehab.com/

Read the transcript:

Garrett Salpeter (00:01.318)
Hello, New Fit Nation. Welcome to the undercurrent podcast. And today I am joined by my good friend, Wesley Kress, who is a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and has been using the newbie for several years and also has his MBA. So he has a very interesting mix educationally in terms of the Eastern traditional Chinese medicine and all of the associated.

modalities like acupuncture and pharmacology, Chinese herbs and things like that. So he has a very good understanding of biochemistry, physical medicine, and also really some really wonderful thinking on life and energy, various applications of the newbie. The last time we were together, for example, just a little over a month before we’re sitting here to record this.

We had lunch, sat down and talked for three hours. It flew by, could have easily done another three or more. So I’m really excited to share this conversation with all of you. Wesley also just a fun fact was a part of the first ever in-person newbie certification that we did back in 2017. So he and I have known each other quite a while here. And.

I’ve been wanting to bring his wisdom to this podcast for a long time. I’m very excited. We’re finally able to do that today. So Wes, welcome.

Wesley Kress (01:26.722)
Thank you, Garrett. It’s been a pleasure being a part of New Fit. Still remember our first engagement back at Bulletproof Conference and getting to know you and all the powerful work that you have set forth and.

you know, in terms of both education with New Fit and then also bringing this technology to the masses. And I know we both align on that and how powerful it is in relationship to healing and the relationship with the nervous system, which I know we’ll get into today. So really appreciate you having me on. Just to add to the nature of experience there, I would say that majority of my experience actually is from direct experience. And I think that there’s a little bit of a difference there.

of like if you and I were to study bodybuilding for 10 years and to never actually do bodybuilding, we might intellectually be able to road map.

actually like all the scientific components of it, but had we not actually done the bodybuilding, we wouldn’t be any closer to that endpoint of direct understanding. And so direct understanding is, and direct experience is different than the nature of that through the intellectual mind. And they’re both helpful and they’re both necessary, but one gives us an effective map. And the other one sort of like is information

creates transformation. And I know that both you and I are both aligned with like the effect of change. And I think some of that is what we’ll get into today in the conversation as it relates to Chinese medicine. I had some early on life trauma that sort of sent me out of my body, so to speak, even though I didn’t know and into the nature of the mind. And so before I ever really got to come all the way back into my body and consider embodiment

Wesley Kress (03:24.112)
that I spent the majority of my life trying to map reality and understand it through the level of the mind until I got to the edge of the mind and then realize that there was no accuracy or truth to be had in its totality at the level of the mind. And we can talk more about that.

Garrett Salpeter (03:43.362)
Yeah, that’s a great theme to introduce here at the beginning, because that’s something that will be one of the through lines for this conversation. And I can relate to that too. There’s many times in my life where I read something in my early 20s, and then 10 or 15 years later, I finally am doing the thing or have sort of embodied it or it just has sort of become a part of me.

there is that shift from intellectually understanding something to actually living it, being able to do it, sort of in absorbing it as part of who we are, who we’re becoming there. So that’s definitely, that’s a very good distinction. So we’ll keep that in mind as we go through this multi-pronged.

discussion. The other theme that I definitely want to touch on is we’re going to be talking about energy. So to complete the introduction to our conversation today, whether that’s energy in the form of

of Qi in Chinese medicine, whether it’s energy in the form of biochemistry, and we’re actually talking about ATP and energy substrates like pyruvate and different things, whether it’s in the form of the nervous system and how efficiently or inefficiently it uses or wastes energy, some of these themes here. So I want us to be definitely keeping that lens in mind. And one of the things that I anticipate people will get out of listening to this conversation

Garrett Salpeter (05:16.004)
you know, frame up for themselves to think about the concept of energy. And ultimately,

tangible strategies to be able to increase their own energy. Cause I think that if there’s anything that people really want in this day and age, it’s, it’s to have, we want to feel vibrant like we can get through the day and still have a surplus of energy left over. Not like we’re dragging through, you know, it’s, there’s a lot of, a lot of environmental factors working against all of us having energy. So, so we’ll leave that there and let, let’s, let’s transition into traditional Chinese medicine first, because I, you know, as a,

especially as a, you know, Western trained engineer, you know, thought of, you know, for many years was sort of led to think of Chinese medicine as sort of woo-woo and not unsophisticated. And then I heard you explain it to me and thought, oh my gosh.

this makes a ton of sense, even to my Western-oriented mind. And it was sort of the first description of Chinese medicine that really landed for me. So can you share with everyone listening here your understanding of, you know, Qi, yin and yang, Chinese medicine, and sort of how, what it’s really doing, what it’s really trying to accomplish, and how it works.

Wesley Kress (06:41.002)
Yes, so I think that the best place to start with that is talking about what you were just talking about in relationship to the different models you threw out in energy, right? So intellectually speaking, we all have different models as it relates to pointing to the same thing. So

For instance, if we had a Chinese speaker or a Spanish speaker start using other words in their language, pointing to the same thing, we wouldn’t automatically say, oh, that’s esoteric or that’s woo woo. They’re just using a different word to point to the same thing.

in the same way that when we talk about energy, right, and you say the word Qi, and you’re referring to it, because you don’t understand the word Qi as it relates to Chinese medicine, it sounds woo woo, right?

And the same way that a Chinese person who only understand that and they started talking about the nature of using language such as mitochondria or biochemistry and so forth. They’re using a different model of understanding at the level of the intellect. Right. And so we use models at the level of the mind to help us understand.

Reality, but at the end of the day, we’re both pointing to something that’s the same Right both pointing using different parts of that model different language to understand the same thing so to start off the understanding of Chinese medicine and

Wesley Kress (08:24.298)
especially in relationship, is to understand the language and how it’s constructed first. So the language is constructed very differently than the language of English.

So the Chinese language, they, for instance, use a single word in relationship to the context and the whole as the primary way of deriving understanding. So what I mean by that is if you use the word qi and you go to a simple English to Chinese dictionary, you will have 500 different meanings, right? This is in stark contrast to a more definitive language, which is the English language.

to a dictionary, each word is defined on its own outside of the whole. And this is fantastic for business and law and so forth, but the emphasis is on the individual part, the individual word, the individual constituent. Whereas in the Chinese language, that word is only understood in relationship to the whole.

So if you put Qi in somewhere other context, it could mean something entirely different. So you really only understand its meaning if you understand its relationship to the whole. So in the nature of Chinese medicine…

What differs so much different than the way Western medicine came about, because they both arose from these languages as conceptual models, is that the Chinese emphasis was always on the whole, and that each part was only secondary in importance. And that’s why most of the medicine looks like patterns, relationships of interdependence, meaning the relationship within.

Wesley Kress (10:19.314)
and interdependence, meaning the relationship to the variables outside. So it would be like you have a relationship with yourself, which is intra, and you have an interrelationship with your family members. So in contrast to this, in Western medicine, they look at the individual constituent as the primary emphasis. So everything studied in reference to the output.

And that’s why almost all pharmacological interventions are trying to alter the output of something. And there’s some limitations there because every time you alter the output without correcting the process, is it’s like an Excel spreadsheet gets pulled up and you chose not to touch the formula, but you keep changing the output. And that’s why most pharmacological evidence or medicines have nothing to do with healing.

They do have everything to do with survival and they do have everything to do with the nature of life-saving intervention and that’s where Western medicine shines, right? So what has the biggest parts of Western medicine done for the collective health? It’s been acute infectious disease.

but 93 to 96% of all pharmaceuticals treat chronic disease. Why? Because from a business and economic standpoint, you have repeating revenue. So there’s a big distinction there. And so when we understand the origins of the language and we understand the nature of these relationships, we can start to understand Chinese medicine. So Chinese medicine,

needs to be understood when you understand models. So what are models? Models are graphical, mathematical, or symbolic representations using physical and verbal representations of a simplified version of a concept, a phenomenon, relationship, structure.

Wesley Kress (12:38.086)
system or some abstract element of the real world. And so the key word there is it’s a simplified version. And so why do we use models at the level of the mind? We’re using models so that we can, one, understand reality that has this infinite amount of complexity by

truncating or making the amount of that information smaller so that we can understand it. So models are always limited in their capacity to help us understand reality. But it moves to the second reason we use models is we use it for what if scenarios. So we’re trying to actually make decisions off of those models.

And third is the models themselves are helpful in the nature of controlling and explaining and predicting the nature of reality.

Garrett Salpeter (13:45.61)
And so just to kind of clarify that for everyone. So we’re essentially talking about abstraction, almost like converting from analog to digital or something like that. But abstraction, if I say tree, it could be a maple tree, a pine tree, an oak tree. It could be different sizes. It could be have red leaves or in autumn or it could be bear in winter. It could be green in summer.

And so it kind of points to the thing, but it isn’t actually the thing. There’s a lot more in that thing, a lot more information about size, color, depth, health there. So the word is sort of a model or an abstraction of the actual thing in the same way that this model is the abstraction of whatever element of reality it’s attempting to explain. Is that a fair summary?

Wesley Kress (14:41.534)
Yes, and to relate it to the audience, because this will be a little more understandable, is like you and I both go to say the Grand Canyon and you have a story, an abstraction using language as to your experience. And it will never encompass the nature of being there because there was so much going on, right? There was just so many other variables, but you’ve used language, which is actually a symbolic model.

and you were describing your experience. And I also use language to describe my experience. And even though we were right there together having the same experience, my abstraction of that experience is different than yours. Right? And so we’ve truncated the nature of reality. And so that’s why at the nature of the mind, nothing can be fully true.

Garrett Salpeter (15:26.114)
Okay, I’m with you.

Wesley Kress (15:37.062)
is because it’s the mind is a shrinkage of reality into something that we can then communicate and that is why we have a mind to begin with. Evolutionary speaking we have a mind so that we can communicate with each other and we can start to understand reality but when we start defending the mind as if it’s a

true is where we have all the problems in the world. Is that we’re pointing to something and defending it as if this sort of thing that we have in the mind is actually more important than truth and reality. And we start defending it. So to give an example of models, there’s sort of three different versions of models.

Garrett Salpeter (16:05.485)
Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter (16:18.574)
Yes.

Wesley Kress (16:26.846)
you could take iconic models. So iconic models is like the model of an airplane, right? So you might have a small airplane and it looks very much like Boeing 737. You have a sort of iconic model. So you have a shrunk down version. That’s what we consider an iconic model or a model train, right? Where I’ve got this exact model train, but we know that it’s not the real train.

but it’s similar, it looks alike, right? And then you might have an analogous model. So the other versions of models is analogous. So analogous would be like drawing a map. Like no one’s gonna confuse the map, right, for the real thing. But it’s analogous in our ability to understand how to navigate the real thing.

Right, so if I’ve got a map of say the US and I’m trying to get somewhere, driving somewhere, this is an example of a model that we use to apply to reality. The third model, this is where everything gets confusing for the level of the mind, is symbolic models. And those are mathematical in nature and they are very symbolic.

So forms of this is like scientific models or mathematical models and because there are so many variables in the nature of reality we use mathematical models.

and scientific models as a way of going deeper and accounting for more variables as a way of understanding and applying these models. And so to lead into Chinese medicine is that third model which is symbolic model is what Chinese medicine is. In the same way that mathematics is a symbolic model, right? We use mathematics to understand reality.

Wesley Kress (18:38.55)
So I wouldn’t walk into your engineering class and then be like, hey, Garrett, like you have all of these symbols going on, like are those real? And you wouldn’t sit there standing there arguing with me that they’re real. But if you walk into a Chinese medicine course and you see the symbols of Qi or Yin and Yang or say a five element model like, you know, fire.

wood, earth, water, metal. People in Chinese eyes sometimes would defend those as if they’re real. But there’s a misunderstanding here. And so I would say that this is where things go really wrong is that we’ll never be able to prove that Qi is real in the same way that we would never be able to prove

A mathematical model is true outside of its relationship to the truth of the model itself.

Wesley Kress (19:45.214)
It’s at the level of the mind and the conceptual model that it might be true or untrue. But you can’t prove that it’s true at the level of reality.

Garrett Salpeter (19:58.25)
There’s, in other words, there’s no fundamental, there’s always a translation between the fundamental thing and the description of the thing. There’s always some translation and something, some element is going to be lost in translation. Going back to what you shared in the very beginning, sort of the difference between direct experience and intellectual experience. Okay.

Wesley Kress (20:09.456)
Yes.

Wesley Kress (20:24.074)
Yes, yes. And this ties into the nature of reality and spirituality, which is just actually a form of self-realization and how those things actually intertwine and why there are paradoxes that exist in the nature of reality. It’s because everything at the level of the mind eventually loops back around. And so every intellectual model…

essentially has its limitations. There’s an individual and his name escapes me, but he proved that mathematics, that everything in mathematics was only pointing to the axioms, which was sort of like the things that, the rules that were based off of the model itself and that they weren’t actually proving anything. And of course,

This was a very interesting and he’s had people, there’ve been many people like on Lex Friedman and different podcasts showing this component that you can’t actually use anything at the level of the mind to prove itself. It’s set for within the model, if that makes sense. And so Chinese medicine,

was actually the basis of it is mathematical in nature. So yin and yang is actually…

it comes from and derived from the I Ching. So the I Ching is sort of the basis mathematically of everything. And the I Ching, that word stands for the book of changes. So the Chinese philosophy understanding about nature, the world, everything interconnected was really studying change.

Wesley Kress (22:04.378)
And I would say that’s very relevant to the nature of medicine, because essentially what we’re studying in medicine is how to affect change. The beauty of it is the reason Chinese medicine, the model can be so much more effective is that its primary emphasis is on the whole. And the word healing is derived from the word wholeness. So, so going back to what we were talking before, is that like,

Healing is actually not to be found in the nature of correcting some sort of individual constituent as the primary emphasis and not that you’re ignoring the whole, but you’re just negating it to second order importance. And in Chinese medicine, the first order of importance is the whole and of second importance is the individual part or constituents, which all have a relative relationship.

of interactions. Like there’s nothing that’s static in nature. If you move one thing, you move all those things simultaneously. So you need a model that can account for the intra and interdependent parts in relationship to everything else. So the nature of how this language and symbology came about was, in fact,

it’s like binary code. So binary code is, was, and Boolean logic was derived from an individual that then went on to develop Boolean logic and modern day computing. So everything within Chinese medicine, like even the meridians are actually the most effective map that we have of the nervous system.

And why that is so important is because the nervous system is extraordinarily complex and it is sort of the basis of every other interacting system. And so the reason that needles were used and acupuncture was used was that they were actually modulating and mediating the nature of change using needles to stimulate.

Wesley Kress (24:22.594)
portions of the nervous system to affect change.

Wesley Kress (24:29.426)
If you look at the model of the body, and this is gonna maybe be a little challenging for people to understand, but if you look at the model of the body, it’s essentially a fractal. So the humerus bone is almost identical to the femur bone. And when I say identical, it’s just in relative relationship. It would be kind of like what we’re talking about in the primary.

iconic model where it’s just like a smaller structure, but similar in its sort of looking. And if you look at the radius and ulnar bone, right, and then also look at the tibia and fibula, they’re also iconic models of each other, right? And the hands and feet are also that, right? So you have a repeating pattern. And so the nature of Chinese medicine…

was they were looking at and how you actually arrived at acupuncture points was you were using channel theory. They knew that the right side of the brain affected the left side of the body and the left side of the brain affected the right side of the body. And they also knew that the more distal you got, that the more change was impacted. And we know that.

now in Western understanding is that if you look at the homunculus model, which is more of a scientific model of the way the brain sees the body, is that the hands and the feet and the lips and from the elbow down, the knee down, they have more sensory inputs from the environment than anything else.

Right? So that means that there’s more brain real estate assigned to those because the nature of survival was to engage safely in our environment. So of course we put more resources on the nature of inputs that we did on outputs. Outputs were only secondary. Right? And so motor is sort of like an output of sensory input.

Wesley Kress (26:41.934)
And that’s where you get the spectrum of athletes and how the people who are very sensitive to the nature of inputs, like the stories you hear of Roger Federer, who really could tell the difference between his racket at fractions of an ounce, or Tiger Woods who could recognize that his club was off by fractions of an ounce, was his ability to sense the differentiation of relativity in terms of what he knew to be how it felt.

all based on the nervous system.

Garrett Salpeter (27:15.366)
Okay, so there’s the makings of a model here. So in terms of the symbolic mathematical, can we build out that symbolic and mathematical model a little further here? So we have this fractal nature, we have the repeating patterns, we have more

input from and therefore more opportunity to create effect more distally, so hands and feet, which of course have more nerve endings, more mechanoreceptors from a Western anatomical perspective, more potential here in the traditional Chinese model for changing inputs. Can you speak to the nature of qi in this model and what that?

is

Wesley Kress (28:10.338)
Yeah, so the basis of the model is energy. So I would consider it as like the operating system, right? And if just for the Western listeners and people who are more Western trained is that your autonomic nervous system, right? Your sympathetic and your parasympathetic are sort of like the nature of…

compensation that happens throughout the entire body depending on the amount of energy available to the system. And there is an interacting component here, meaning that everything is sort of interdependent and interdependent to some degree. But, the reason the Chinese said that the energy or qi component was of the utmost importance is because

If you increase an energy of a system, you decrease the level of entropy and thus you change the paradigm at which it’s operating. And you can do this through two different sides, right? You can sort of do this through the supply side or the demand side. So the demand side…

for more Western understanding and jumping back and forth because this would be more relative importance to some people trying to grasp these concepts. Like you take a demand side of the equation, take a hormone like leptin, it determines long-term energy storage available to the body. Insulin is more of a molecule that accounts for a short-term energy.

demand for the body, right? And then you would take an external stressors like cortisol, which cortisol anything we’re interacting externally and that externally may be just the nature of exercise or it may be perceived threats in the mind and that requires a lot of energy demand, right? The internal demand is inflammation.

Wesley Kress (30:14.382)
So these are all the demand sides of the equation and then the supply side, for more Western trade mine, is sort of the nature of mitochondria and methylation and the ability to, if you alter the supply of the demand side, meaning if you lower the demand side or you actually increase the supply side, you’re sort of having the same sort of positive impact of energy available to the system.

Right? And you can work at either angle because it’s all interdependent and has a relationship. And so this also encompasses the nature of one model that I’ll throw in that may be of relative helpful understanding here is that if I were to account for someone’s genetics, right? It would be like the model of a gun, right? You have a loaded gun.

and the safety on that gun is more in relationship to the supply side, the methylation side. And the demand side determines whether that trigger gets pulled if it outweighs the supply side. So that is your psychological, your environment, and your lifestyle and trauma.

And just so you know, unprocessed trauma, if it’s happened to you, is still here, right here, right now, just because your attention, meaning your egoic structure and your mind has contracted away from it, does not mean that it’s not happening in your neurology and your physiology right here, right now. And in fact…

Garrett Salpeter (32:04.743)
So let me just pause for one second here. So this is a great time. I just wanna clarify real quick. So supply, I think we understand is.

energy generating, if we think about like a bank account, it’s putting energy into the account. So creating energy through healthy mitochondria or functioning mitochondria. And then the demand side is what’s being drawn. So cortisol is mobilizing energy, taking energy out of the bank account to meet immediate needs. Inflammation is using energy to fight ideally something acute. But when it’s chronic, still trying to fight, still using energy to fight even if it’s not healthy and productive.

insulin causing energy to be stored for use at a later time, right? Getting blood sugar in.

is helping to kind of balance demand. Leptin, my understanding of leptin, part of this is to confirm or perhaps clarify with you, my understanding of leptin is that it’s released when our body perceives essentially energy satiety. It perceives that we have enough nutrition and so it tells us we’re good. One, we don’t have to feel hungry and two, it gives us a drive to be more active. It’s like, okay, we got energy now we can go do the thing. We can start to spend energy. So is that, are we getting all those variables right?

Wesley Kress (33:21.059)
Yep.

Yeah, and so leptin really is like a signal from like fat itself and this is where like the interdependence and starts to become or interdependence starts to become very interesting because like if the body has too much fat, right, then what ends up happening in the inflammation cycle of demand is it goes up because if you’re familiar with the dipokines, which are sort of the molecules released from fat cells that are inflammatory in nature,

all of this, like excess calories, but it doesn’t have the ability to process it. When to go back to…

The methylation side is like every micronutrient is what actually processes macronutrients. Like you don’t just take in macronutrition and it just automatically gets processed. Like everything gets processed because of micronutrition. So it’s kind of like if you had all the raw materials coming into a factory, right, and you didn’t have the ability to process that.

then of course it would all get stored away. And so sort of we have this high caloric malnutrition happening broadly, where you sort of void of a lot of these micronutrients. And some of this is a little more complicated and nuanced because what’s happened is that every, from my perspective of direct experience having

Wesley Kress (34:51.982)
three autoimmune diseases at 19, and 70 different signs and symptoms and unable to get out of bed, and now being on the opposite end of that spectrum, that essentially all sickness and disease is a compensation in the body. And it’s compensating depending on your unique genetics, and a result of that supply and demand curve of energy.

And so when, what happens is some of these genes get turned on. And so you have like autoimmune is just like a more progressive energy deficit, right? So for instance, if there’s not enough supply being produced by the mitochondria, then what ends up happening is the sympathetic nervous system has to stay on. Because the sympathetic nervous system is what’s tapping into your credit system.

It’s not real energy. It’s stress energy to help you stay alive.

If you keep that system on long enough, the body has to actually make further compensations. And so almost all chronic disease is precipitated by some form of acute stress that turned into a chronic stress that tapped the energy reserves to where the supply ended up becoming lower than the demand. And thus you had to have further compensations occur.

And that’s where the importance of helping to reset this system by unwinding the demands and also improving the supply so that the autonomic nervous system can unwind those compensations is how we get back to healing and wholeness. So I mean, to give you a real world example in my own healing is one of the things I noticed is that among…

Wesley Kress (36:56.406)
when I was trying to heal and I read thousands and thousands of books on functional medicine, integrative medicine, Chinese medicine, Western medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, is essentially notice that a lot of people, if they did have chronic disease or sickness, is that they only got back to where they were functional, but they didn’t get back to where they were replete. And an athlete can know this from the relationship to where like, you might recover from that injury where you don’t have the pain.

but you didn’t get back to your full performance or beyond that. And I was a perfect example of that. And until I figured out the nature of deficiency, which was how to figure out the…

the, you could quote and say the repletion side or the performance side of things, I never got into embodiment or what my normal genetic expression would have been. And when I was studying the classics in Chinese medicine, one of the things I realized is that the thing that they noticed is the hardest thing to treat was deficiency. And they weren’t referring to deficiency in terms of, okay, you didn’t have a specific micronutrient. They were referring to deficiencies

compensation that took place in the body that dealt with certain enzymatic processes that became depleted and thus changed the gene expressions and so to get someone from chronic disease sickness and so forth back into relation was to be able to impact those genes to turn them back off or excuse me turn them back off and turn other ones back on but

In order to do that, you needed to affect the supply side. And so when I figured out how to fix the supply side on mine, and barring you, I’ve been an athlete.

Wesley Kress (38:52.134)
even though through my sickness and disease and part of the thing that helped me understand the relationship with my body was that I always exercise, I always train, but at 19 I stopped power lifting because that energy demand was too strong and that was too much of a stress. So I had to stop that and my weight because of my disease processes went from 167 at 19 to 137.

Wesley Kress (39:19.97)
and it stayed there for about a decade and it you know went up and down for different myriad of reasons and then when I corrected some part of that equation it improved to 167 again but ultimately this was uh still again not my correct baseline and then I figured out the deficiency side of things

And within less than a year, and I’m 35 now, I put on 40 pounds of muscle, and I was working out at 30% of the degree of intensity and duration that I was before. So it didn’t come from the nature of adding more stimulus. It came from affecting the energy equation so that the adaptations were more effective.

And so this unlocked entirely different paradigm in terms of my entire physiology and all those genes followed. And muscle is just a luxury. So it’s not necessary for survival. And so the higher the energy of the individual’s organism, the more that you will get to performance. Because performance is not survival-oriented.

Wesley Kress (40:44.134)
And so whatever you do on that equation should focus on raising the body’s energy and reducing the demands, meaning the stressors that are chronic in nature so that the body can express its highest order of performance.

Garrett Salpeter (41:06.066)
So all of that, I mean, I think your story is fascinating to, especially knowing even more that I have from other conversations, knowing more details of the depth of the symptoms and the difficulties of having multiple autoimmune conditions. And you touched on it there, but to have.

bend down to those depths of health and energy and to have built yourself back up is a journey. I certainly wanna acknowledge you for that. And it’s also amazing how you’ve been able to take those lessons and experiences and translate them and pay it forward to help other people with various, whether it be autoimmune challenges or chronic fatigue or more complicated things, more complicated diseases, diagnoses, challenges.

So that is excellent. You know in terms of this I do want to try to come back and see if we can close the loop here on the Chinese medicine symbolic model Because when we’re talking about supply and demand and we’re talking about This conversation on energy

I think, I mean, it certainly makes a lot of sense to me. It also would make sense to me just entirely through a Western lens, not even considering the Chinese model, right? Supply and demand is what we talk about, bank accounts is what we talk about. So just to kind of close the loop, can we tie that back into the Chinese medicine model and share essentially how looking at it through that.

the connection between how looking through that lens of traditional Chinese medicine sort of got you here to this, which likely will make sense to everybody who’s listening. Just help connect the dots, I guess, is the best way to say it.

Wesley Kress (42:48.054)
Yeah, so the way it circled back is there was a sort of over the last two years, I had tremendous amount of epiphanies that gave way in terms of connecting the dots from both the Chinese understanding and more of a Western understanding. And, you know, if you were to use the words contraction and expansion, every process in the body is either contraction or expansion.

And you could say they extend that even as far as reality, these sort of models, and you could say that’s one Jian and one Jiang. So one of the things that I noticed is that the nature of contraction, which would be considering like how my physiology was being impacted, was it was a very contracted state.

Right? So I went back and I looked at the nature of Chinese herbology. And I looked at yang herbs in particular, which are more expansionary, that they see that as the anabolic processes of the body. And when I mentioned that everyone’s looking at the same thing, meaning reality, and they’re using different language to help us understand it, that’s what I’m referring to. So I, when I looked at the herbs, one of the things I understood was

Most of the herbs, I think over 70 different herbs that are young herbs, they use PDE5 inhibitors. So PDE5 inhibitors are nitric oxide inhibitors, which meaning it prevents the breakdown of nitric oxide. It doesn’t supply nitric oxide, but it prevents the breakdown of it. And so…

What is nitric oxide? Nitric oxide is an expansionary molecule and there’s been articles, at least one within one Chinese publication that said that it had a close relationship to the nature of what we understand Qi to be. And again, I say this with a big caveat, no single constituent could ever be a one-to-one based on what we talked about in the construction of the language. But it seemed as if these processes

Wesley Kress (44:57.484)
relationship and if you understand nitric oxide you understand that molecule is the main gas molecule of the parasympathetic nervous system. So if you do not have enough nitric oxide in your system the fact that your parasympathetic nervous system is off is very probable because

it is actually a direct result of health of the vascular system. You have three versions of nitric oxide, endothelionitric oxide, you have neuronal nitric oxide, and you have inducible nitric oxide. Inducible nitric oxide is the molecule tends to be rampant in the nature of autoimmune diseases, and it gets reduced when you have high amounts of endothelionitric oxide, which come from the vasculature itself.

And when it’s produced, it not only vasodilates, which allows blood flow to get to everything in the body and heal, but it actually affects the autonomic nervous system directly. And so in stress, the body ends up

essentially creating a contractionary mechanism of staying in a sympathetic dominance state. And so what happens is the components of all of these things end up creating

a catabolic state in the body, meaning a breaking down that’s more than the rebuilding. And you can see this in all chronic diseases and all sicknesses is that there’s more breakdown than there is of rebuilding. And Yang and Yin was a way, all Yang and Yin is it’s a result of a comparison. And so these models helped me understand the nature of relationship as it related to contraction and expansion.

Wesley Kress (46:58.864)
is also the main signal gas molecule of insulin, meaning it helps with insulin sensitivity. And so it also plays a direct role in the nature of the Krebs cycle and the citric acid cycle that if in fact you have specific micronutrient deficiencies or enzyme deficiencies that nitric oxide will not be produced. And so

in a catabolic state where someone’s in a contractionary state and they’re in a state of survival, the body will maintain in that direction because the fundamental laws of nature is that nature continues in the direction of least resistance unless a force significant enough is acted upon it to move it in another direction.

And so while we are designed to heal, we are not inherently designed to heal without the correct appropriate inputs. And so with the model of Chinese medicine,

what they were looking at is it was very much like the correct inputs of software programming, right? Is you were using specific portions of needles and different things to improve the nature of programming, meaning efficiency would be like a software update, right? That then interacted with the nature of the hardware. But at that fundamental operating system was energy.

And the issue with Chinese medicine, and also the issue with the nature of where we are collectively, is the energy is fundamentally being challenged on every level. And that is a great degree to do with our contraction at the level of the mind, and modern day stressors, chemicals from the environment, and so forth, every pharmaceutical.

Wesley Kress (48:57.522)
works predominantly by impacting the mitochondria.

So you end up giving way to further compensations and quote unquote micronutrient deficiencies, which are a little bit different than epigenetic changes that happen in the case of certain compensations. And that is why there is a significant amount of disease and sickness. On top of that, you have all the demands of collective trauma and so forth. So…

when we’re looking at the nature of the model of Chinese medicine is that we’re using it as a way of understanding this relationship of how to rebalance the autonomic nervous system to reduce the demands and to simultaneously improve the energy. So for instance, if you’re in a state of stress, we know that the mitochondria…

Garrett Salpeter (49:58.459)
Let me just pause for one second to see if I can kind of summarize to set the stage for this next part. So would it be fair to say that the sort of underlying fundamental problem of talking about chronic disease, adverse…

health outcomes here outside of acute trauma of course, but these adverse health outcomes, we have essentially a deficit of energy either because there’s deficient supply or there’s excess demand or a combination of the two. And then as a compensatory mechanism, we have chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

to activate essentially that backup supply. And then that is an excess buildup of yin in the Chinese model or in Western language, an excess amount of time spent in a catabolic breaking down state. And eventually as things break down, wherever the person is most vulnerable, depending on their genetic triggers, where that gun is pointed or where it’s loaded to that metaphor, then.

that’s essentially what’s gonna break down and lead to symptomology first. But is that sort of a fair summary just to make sure all those concepts are tied together and fresh on everyone’s mind? Okay.

Wesley Kress (51:18.518)
Yes, I will give one analogy, which I give a lot of my patients, because I think that, you know, they don’t really have understanding of medicine and the way our audience does is it’s more kind of relatable because we are sort of a microcosm, meaning everything within us is also mirrored outside of us. That the best way of understanding this sort of conceptual understanding of the model that we’re talking about is to look at the nature of war.

So war, for instance, every single war is fought off of energy, right? It could be in the form of natural resources like natural gas, oil. It could be in the form of food energy like corn, wheat, whatever, or it could be in the symbolic representation of money. Money is a form of stored energy, right? And so when you have two countries that are fighting,

The way Western medicine approaches this fight, which is the sort of inflammatory process that’s going on, is to say, oh, it’s the inflammation that’s the problem. It’s like.

It’s like, okay, so if we supply that country with more warheads and more tanks and the other country with more warheads and more tanks, do we get more or less inflammation? We get more. But if we say, okay, we’re gonna suppress this, which is how Western medicine intervenes with like prednisone or some form of immunosuppressant, is to say like, okay, we’re going to suppress one side of the immune system.

or some aspects so that we can reduce the war. But without fixing the underlying energy issue, which is why the wars start to begin with, you’ll never have a resolution.

Wesley Kress (53:13.442)
Right? Instead, if you fix the underlying energy issue, whatever that may be within that context, then the war would cease. And so the way in which medicine is looking at this problem is fundamentally flawed. Because if we add, meaning improve the energy within a system by reducing the demands or improving the supply,

then the compensations will automatically unwind.

Wesley Kress (53:48.47)
because you’re shifting the nature of the operating system.

Garrett Salpeter (53:53.898)
And in that state, if both sides have enough energy, then they feel no more need to fight the war, so to speak.

Wesley Kress (53:53.974)
Right? It’s…

Wesley Kress (54:01.97)
Yeah and so you can have like for instance just for your listeners to understand from like a the nature of the nervous system is the vagus nerve is 80% of the parasympathetic nervous system and if the vagus nerve is activated it’s it basically inhibits all the inflammatory pathways down the lung and

If the mitochondria feel safe, which parasympathetic nervous system is a representation of safety, then they upregulate their energy stores, meaning their output. And in fact, we know that the amygdala starts to reduce in its activity. We know that the mitochondria feel safe and they increase their energy output.

Right? And so the whole point of healing is to get the point to where the nervous system feels safe. And it by, as a result, we can improve the nature of energy output of the mitochondria. And that safety can happen through the means of communication on a biochemistry level, which is part of the equation.

or on a neurological level, which is like acupuncture or even the newbie, right? So the newbie, what it’s doing is both adding energy to the system, but it’s increasing the degree of communication back to the brain. And as it increases communication, the brain is now able to have both more efficiency in its communication there, reducing the demand.

and its supply will automatically go up because the threat response is reduced. And if the threat response is reduced, then the mitochondria are going to increase in its output. Right, the whole reason meditation is one of the most important things for the nature of healing and health is because you are actually doing weightlifting for the parasympathetic nervous system.

Garrett Salpeter (56:04.718)
I like that metaphor. Let’s expand on that one a little bit more.

Wesley Kress (56:09.314)
So the components is that most of adaptation looks at the nature of adaptation through the stress stimuli response, right? And so they look at like, okay, what triggers the sympathetic nervous system so that the parasympathetic nervous system can respond? But no one looks at the other side of the equation.

And I would just say some of this is sociocultural, that like you won’t really see a lot of bodybuilders meditating and you won’t see a lot of athletes do it. And of course it’s changed a little bit now, but people are still kind of thinking it’s somewhat of a mind thing. And it’s actually not, right? It’s more to do with the nature of how it’s impacting our physiology.

And our physiology has a greater impact on our psychology. That’s why exercise is one of the most powerful things as it relates to mental health. Like, of course, you and I, you can have a problem, right? And you could come to me and say, okay, you know, X, Y, and Z is going on in my life. And I could talk to you and help you sort of like create a new story, a reframing.

or I could have you actually get active and move. And the latter is going to actually have a greater impact on the nature of your ability to process because these systems aren’t separate. Your physiology impacts your psychology in the same way your psychology impacts your physiology. It just so happens that your physiology has a greater impact on your psychology than vice versa. I mean…

toxic psychology over time will have a great impact on the physiology, but it just takes time because thoughts are essentially proteins, but they are sort of less energy behind them. You could say that they are less impactful in terms of the nature of the energy equation. And so when you look at the side of the equation of

Wesley Kress (58:14.214)
meditation as it relates to the parasympathetic. If you type in meditation and mitochondria, you’ll see study after study show that the mitochondria gene expression, which they have their own DNA gene expression, changes as a result of meditation. The ability for you to teach the nervous system to actually feel like it’s safe in stillness

is a big part of the nature of doing meditation. Because most trauma or people who are overstimulated is that they are only feeling safe based on the relative experience of what they’ve experienced up to this point. Meaning, why does someone stay in an abusive relationship is because they’ve survived that same abusive relationship time and time again.

And because the nervous system in the mind says, we’ve survived it, this has to be safer than us trying something brand new, which we don’t know if we’ll die. Because it doesn’t have any sort of predictable model of that. And so it moves in the path of least resistance. And this is why people stay in very disease and chronic sickness as they do in toxic relationships is because it always moves in the path of least resistance.

And so when you’re in meditation, a big part of meditation is to essentially let go of the contractions in the body and the mind.

And as you do, not only do you free up the demand side, because for every contraction in the body or resistance, it requires a lot of energy to repair those things.

Wesley Kress (01:00:04.706)
but you are actually improving the supply side because mitochondria are now actually having energy increase as a result of feeling safe. But psychologically, there is a polarity shift that takes place, and that inflection point is a little bit different. So if you first sit down for meditation, the way most people do it is, if I were to give an analogy, is that

you’re playing a high school football game and you’re in the finals and you decide to go pull someone out of the stands to go in as quarterback and they have no skills, right? They haven’t practiced, they haven’t done that. That’s when people meditate. You know, they’re sort of going through all this chaos in their life. They have all these emotional reactions and then they’re meditating. Like how effective is it to derive a skill?

that you do not have, meaning you’re teaching your nervous system how to be still in that chaos. That’s why we say you can’t create heaven in hell, you have to step into heaven and then you can step back into hell, meaning chaos, and still be in heaven. So the nature of heaven being like stability and the ability to feel stillness and safety

And so the difference here is that if someone is to practice meditation, and sometimes it requires longer-term meditation to get to that polarity shift, then they will actually…

move to a state where they have an inflection point. And that inflection point is where the nature of the nervous system now feels safer in stillness than it does in chaos. And when you get to that shift, you have a huge neurological physiological shift. And sometimes that might take someone doing really like two hours of meditation every single day, or someone going to a meditation retreat.

Wesley Kress (01:02:13.838)
or so forth, but to think that meditation in a more severe case of a nervous system dysregulation would be effective might be the degree of magnitude of the dosing, because if you show up to a wildfire.

with a squirt gun, you’re not going to make that much impact, even though we know fundamentally water puts out fire, right? It’s the magnitude of differential that differs. And so that’s where sort of knowing the level of dysregulation is my nervous system, for instance, because the early on trauma was very normalized to the nature of chaos. So I was very comfortable working 100 plus

very complex models in my mind, studying all forms of finance and learning topics. I was feeling the level of the intellect. The intellect was my form of escapism. You could say it was sort of my addiction away from the nature of my body.

Wesley Kress (01:03:18.066)
And so until I came back to it and processed it, because all forms of meditation actually have direct impact on the nature of the gut and the nature of ability to digest information, right? So if you were to say meditation is literally the processor of information and the ability to absorb it, one would spend a lot less time in the accumulation of information as they would in the processing of it.

And in fact, in Chinese medicine and in some of the Western medicine findings, like meditation improves what we consider the digestive system, which is the Tai Yin system of the body. And this has everything to do with the issue of a lot of Western culture, is they are so over consuming of so much stimuli information and so forth, that the same systems that are trying to process these things are challenged. And

So we have to actually strengthen those systems. One of the best ways to strengthen those systems is actually doing a lot more meditation. So this has a fundamental, if you take someone in a six week study and you have them do 30 minutes of meditation.

we see changes of blood flow away from the amygdala and increases in prefrontal cortex. And as a result, we know that you are now in less of a survival state, which means you have higher vagal tone, which you have a higher output of energy production.

And thus it has a cascade of affecting everything. I mean, the furthest ends of these extremes of relativity is that the nervous system of an enlightened person, which is someone who’s actually digested and processed all of their own conditionings, is fundamentally very different than that of an ordinary person. It would be like a Windows 96 operating system.

Wesley Kress (01:05:12.758)
versus an M4 chip with an operating systems of a Mac OS, the furthest end of that operating system, right? It’s like one, it’s very different.

Garrett Salpeter (01:05:25.764)
So that’s a beautiful description. I wanna make sure that I can sort of.

summarize and tie together these last several minutes here because we’ve covered a lot of ground, but there’s a few key pieces. And we’ve gotten away from a little bit of the theoretical models of traditional Chinese medicine. So we can go back to that if we need to close any loops there. We may not, but there’s one foundational principle here is that, and something you mentioned earlier on is a term called the cell danger response, CDR. And that has

Wesley Kress (01:05:56.5)
Yep.

Garrett Salpeter (01:06:01.588)
People know of mitochondria as energy generators and we’ve talked about that, but they’re also environmental sensors. When they sense danger, they go into essentially a quasi-hibernation mode and they reduce their energy output. Because, for example, if there’s a lot of toxins in the body,

in producing energy, they’d essentially be burning dirty fuel, could be bringing in toxins, damaging themselves, and ultimately, you know, harming themselves. And so they slow down energy to the production to the minimum necessary just to survive, sort of like hibernation. And they also do that in response to psychological stressors and anything that sort of triggers that cell danger response. So there’s…

So that’s where danger versus safety have an effect on energy. Safety, the sense of perception of safety causing increased energy. So that’s one key piece that you said there. Is that a fair description, right? Okay. And then how that relates to trauma and meditation is essentially where someone feels

most safe. If someone, and I’m using safe sort of in air quotes here because someone might feel safe, well someone’s going to feel psychologically speaking safer and physiologically to the sense that you can’t even separate the two like you said, but someone’s going to feel, perceive themselves as safer in a situation that’s familiar. But

but that might be a situation that’s chaotic, you know, an abusive relationship, something that it’s not ultimately good for them, but because it’s familiar, they stay in it because they perceive something else, even if it might end up being better, they perceive it as more dangerous and risky because it’s the fear of the unknown. So the point then of meditation is to help recalibrate that internal perception of safety so that the person can be essentially exposed more to

Wesley Kress (01:07:45.878)
Yes.

Garrett Salpeter (01:07:58.518)
stillness and their true self. So that starts to become more familiar so they can feel safer in, they can feel subjectively safer in a state or an environment that’s that also we could say is more physiologically even objectively safer so that then they’ll spend more time in that state which leads to

actual physiological safety, increase in energy production, and a movement towards greater health. So is that sort of a fair description of those last several minutes of conversation?

Wesley Kress (01:08:28.754)
Yes, the exact summation and you know, acupuncture meditation, there isn’t a huge lot of differentiation, they’re both trying to activate the nature of the vagus nerve and rebalance the autonomic nervous system. And so as a very result of that, you have exactly what you just said, right? It just so happens that when people are in natures of like,

stress meditation is not very effective because they don’t have the skill. Right. So you take someone into acupuncture and then all of a sudden that is like, they’re able to get in a shift in the nervous system. Like most people who come in and they’re processing heavy emotions or an acute trauma or things like that, I use acupuncture for more of a systemic standpoint to reset this. And then I use from a localized standpoint, I use the newbie. And so it depends on the nature of it’s more orthopedic based or is it more systemic and they’re both.

where we go back to the fact that you, you know, they’re so interrelated that you cannot separate these two. It’s just like, is the focus on the part or is it on the whole or is it, you know, the whole is more predominant than the part. So if someone came in with like, you just broke up from the nature of a relationship, the long term, you know, boyfriend girlfriend or a marriage or so forth.

Because emotions are actually the most intense form at which we move away from, the most or the highest demands of energy is around this. That’s why I always tell people like, go train for a marathon and go run a marathon or.

do something like really significantly physically and you know you might be sore for a week but you recover but that’s not the case if you go through a breakup if you know if you sort of sort of go through these emotional things it’s like far more significant and in the nature of its impact and so if we were to talk about the demand side most people’s demand issues all come back to the nature of unprocessed emotions

Garrett Salpeter (01:10:29.128)
Okay. So.

Wesley Kress (01:10:30.042)
every part of their personality is actually a compensation away from feeling these uncomfortable emotions that they haven’t processed.

And so.

Garrett Salpeter (01:10:44.711)
I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that and I wanna come back to that. I also wanna just back up a moment and drill down. So my take on what you just said there is that using acupuncture, using the newbie as nervous system interventions are essentially forms of, or essentially forms of…

input that can create the same effects as what you’re describing as meditation or create those inputs that can help shift where that perception of safety is We’ve you know people who use the newbie or have listened to our previous 60 to 70 episodes on your have a sense of how we use the newbie to identify the person, you know scan around on the body Identify the perception of threat Help to provide that input so the brain can understand can recalibrate understand that is actually, you know not

threatening and can down regulate those protective patterns, create that sort of shift. How are you using acupuncture in that way? Does this have to do with translating what’s going on into a particular meridian or is it always using needles in such a way that you’re going to increase vagus nerve stimulation or what’s just drilling down in that little…

statement there without passing by, I wanted to just touch on that. So how exactly, what’s the sort of analogous approach in acupuncture and Chinese medicine to that sort of approach with the newbie that helps guide the body in that same direction of greater safety and is essentially facilitating the same sorts of things as meditation?

Wesley Kress (01:12:26.69)
Yeah, that’s a great point. So the reason I sort of separate the two is that I see the new fit as sort of like Chinese medicine 2.0 as it relates to like the ability to apply the model principles as it relates to what we would consider as like in the model of like Chinese medicine as a Chi and blood stagnation, which would be in the excess side of pain. And then the way you create or treat deficient requires some sort of a…

biochemistry intervention as well. So the newbie, because of its strength of input, right, being, you know, again, these are somewhat conceptual models, they’re not exact, but, you know, relatively speaking, I would say that like the newbie is able to kind of deliver 250 times the strength of input back to the brain and sort of bypasses the nature of like, you know, a smaller stimuli where if I was orthopedically just doing dry needling,

I would have an input, but that input is weaker, right? And if you have a stronger input, you have more energy going into the system, you have greater change, right? So the ability for the newbie to affect change on an orthopedic level is an advancement in technology with this understanding of this model, right? And so that’s why like…

not only from a safety standpoint, because like most herbs and like solstices and pulsuses were actually trying to do what the newbie was doing. Like if you were to take someone who was non-biased, meaning not married to these ideologies of like the old is better or the new is better, and they were just looking at the application of the model.

terms of like classical Chinese medicine people who did martial arts or whatever the newbie would be like one of the tools that they would put under their umbrella in the same way that we use acupuncture or moxibustion or Chinese medical massage or a modality

Wesley Kress (01:14:30.71)
And so it fits in the nature of my practice to perfection because essentially a lot of the tools that I would have used, the newbie does so at an accelerated rate because it’s just an advancement in technology. I mean, like, of course, like I can calculate math by hand, like no one confuses that, but like if I have an advancement in terms of the calculator, like I’m going to use that, right? And so the newbie is an advancement of this model.

from particularly on the orthopedic side. And it’s not that the newbie isn’t also impacting the nature of the systemic nervous system, right? Because if you reduce the stress on a localized area, right? If someone gets an injury, right? And they’re in pain and they’re in pain long enough, we know that the sympathetic nervous system is chronically activated. I mean, that’s where irritability, frustration and anger is. That’s just a result of over activation of the sympathetic nervous system. If you look at every…

chemical withdrawal of drugs that stimulate the sympathetic nervous system as a way of creating euphoria when they withdraw, almost every one of them have anger, irritability and frustration as a withdrawal symptom. That’s because those are a direct result of essentially a boundary getting impeded.

And the same thing in orthopedic injury, right? You sort of like the boundary of the body impeded with, whether it was from an external force or an internal force, doesn’t really matter, right? So…

the ability to reestablish communication, meaning the prevention of communication because that boundary was impeded, is to then create a degree of homeostasis, which is a reduction in the nature of sympathetic tone on a systemic level and a local level.

Wesley Kress (01:16:20.502)
Right? So the newbies having impact both systemically, indirectly, and directly locally. And I would say again, acupuncture is having more of an impact systemically and secondarily locally. So when you combine those two, you get the best of both worlds. Right? Is that essentially orthopedically speaking, meaning I would be using the newbie as the primary model of application.

And then from an internal medicine standpoint, meaning if someone’s got anxiety or depression, which anxiety and depression are a result of energy deficits, right? Every metabolic disorder.

at the cellular level give way to psychiatric psychological disorders. I mean, I experienced this directly. You know, I had severe depression to the point I couldn’t step outside. I had anxiety to where I couldn’t actually interact with anyone and or step outside. I had the inability to create new memories. I had autoimmune encephalitis where it was attacking my direct brain and nervous system. So…

Part of it, again, this was excessive energy deficits and compensations taking place. But systemically at that point, it’s more effective to use acupuncture and some biochemistry, which is again, part of how I work with.

clients and patients, it’s just knowing where to meet them, but they all interact. And the beauty is the Neubie is facilitating long-term changes in terms of actually helping the person get back to wholeness through what I would consider from a basic conceptual standpoint as reestablishing communication in areas that are shut down because of protective mechanisms.

Wesley Kress (01:18:06.166)
Right? Like it’s, and if you supply a great enough stimuli to reengage, you know, and enough energy behind it, then you can remap something of new pathways or establish pathways that are not completely necrotic or dead. And that’s what we see in some of the case studies in my clinic. For instance, one that you might be familiar with is I dealt with a case where he was a spinal cord injury, the first full

Wesley Kress (01:18:37.68)
complete case that I had dealt with. I dealt with a lot of partials up until this point, but he was an L4, or excuse me, actually he was a T12, actually he was a T12 complete. And so when he came in the clinic, I did an entire scan process of

what was going on and I got zero, you know, turning up to a hundred and I even, you know, I’ve learned through some of the applications of the model of Chinese medicine, how to apply the Neubie in ways at which is a little different than the way it’s taught because if you take the anode and you move the cathode further apart, right? The potentiation of energy through the system is magnified.

And you can sort of explore this by the nature that if I put all the red pads up at my rhomboids and I put the black pads down at my arms, those are not only traversing the peripheral nerves because the nerves come from the spinal cord down, meaning they’re adding energy all the way through the pathway. But because you’re taking the fulcrum, meaning the fulcrum being the center and you’re impacting it at the most distal point, you’re having a greater impact on the brain itself.

So it’s a magnification. And so in cases of certain MS cases where there was more deficiency, meaning they felt less of the signal, I moved the pads further away. And so in a scan process where I have someone who has a neurological deficit, they actually have a deficiency, I want to maximize the level of strength of energy into the system. So I moved the pads.

further away, meaning I might use the scanning process further up the spine to scan the lower body and nothing, no impact whatsoever. So I had created, you know, I had purchased adapters to be able to use on the acupuncture needles because for the alligator clips you just need, you know, a different set of things. And so when I hooked him up…

Wesley Kress (01:20:51.502)
From this standpoint, meaning added energy by getting closer to the proximal nature of the nerve itself and delivering it with a high conductivity mechanism such as a needle, we were able to get neurological activity. And so we was able, you know, essentially muscle contractions,

in the lower body, the big toe is moving, the whole lower body. And it took a lot, whereas like relative in a healthy nervous system, if you do needles with the newbie, if you just turn it up from six to seven or from three to four, it’s like the curve is too sharp in terms of the energy delivery, because the proximity of that delivery is so much different than the pad itself.

Garrett Salpeter (01:21:42.118)
Mm-hmm.

Wesley Kress (01:21:43.932)
nerve and you’re using one of the strongest conductors of electricity which is you know the metal component and so it’s just too overwhelming on the system even though the signal is actually ideal and the current is ideal to the nature of the nervous system and I think that’s you know something that could be considered in relationship to the nature of you know how to progress the delivery of that in more of a like a setting like

in a healthier nervous system is to make it to where it’s like smaller degrees of energy output.

And so this is where things started to happen very interestingly. This case study progressed to the point where not only did he make the point where he was able to have sensations way below the nature of injury and move his leg on his own and actually walk with an apparatus, but he was actually

able to progress to where we no longer needed the needles and we only needed the pad. So the level of neuroplasticity that was taking place was extraordinary through this piece. And one of the ways I sort of did this was I did, you know, anywhere between two to four inch needles or longer in the sacral foramen. So when you go back to the nature of the Chinese model,

as above, as below. And so your autonomic nervous system, which is at your brain stem area and more responsible to the nature of survival instincts is mirrored in the opposite end of your sacrum, right? And so those needles had a greater impact on that regions of the brain and also on the ability to stimulate those nerves, roots that go down to the legs.

Wesley Kress (01:23:39.498)
And we got the most progressive adaptations by just starting doing that. So you can come up to table, lie down, and we do these needles and we’re able to turn it up.

where there was tremendous activity neurologically throughout the whole system both systemically and locally to create enough neuroplasticity and adaptation for change. And so all these things was you know taking into account the nature of you know using the Chinese medicine model with the application of the newbie in representation of taking a case that no one had really had.

And that’s why I always say like, if you have a working model, you don’t really need the recipes, you just need to apply the model. Like a chef doesn’t go to recipes, he understands the model. He absolutely understands the first principles of everything. And those first principles are what give way to the protocols and the model and so forth, if that makes sense.

Garrett Salpeter (01:24:41.114)
That’s awesome. I love that. So one comment just on using the newbie with needles, and I think it’s kind of cool too. We just have naturally touched on several things that I wanted to ask you about, which was using the newbie with acupuncture needles, meditation, stuff like that. So I think that’s very cool. And there…

When the same amount of energy being delivered is dispersed over a two inch by four inch rectangular pad, it’s some number of milliamps per square centimeter. If it’s dispersed through the point of a needle, that same amount of energy, obviously, is going to be a lot more concentrated. And so if the surface area is 1 10th, call it we’ll say, then that means the energy being delivered there is 10 times more. So it’s like if you have the machine at 10,

Wesley Kress (01:25:14.978)
Yes.

Wesley Kress (01:25:21.526)
Yes.

Garrett Salpeter (01:25:33.972)
This is not exact, but just for conversation purposes. It could be the equivalent of delivering 100 through a pad. So I’m glad you found that. And that’s something that someone who is an expert like you are in the use of needles, of course, you can do. But that’s the reason to sort of be cautious with it is because it’s more concentrated, if anyone, if it’s in any one scope of practice and they’re using something like that. But I think it’s awesome that you were able to use it because the…

Wesley Kress (01:25:39.938)
Yes.

Garrett Salpeter (01:26:03.802)
the patient you described who had that spinal cord injury couldn’t even feel the newbie with the regular pads at 100. And so you needed, you know, almost, you know, just metaphorically speaking, or, you know, using our model here to play on the earlier conversation, it’s almost like you needed to turn it up to 500 or 1000. And you, the machine, you can’t do that, but by turning it up to needles at that local point, it was as if you were able to deliver.

the equivalent of 500 or right, just more energy. So I think that was a great application there. Obviously, it led to an incredible result. Thank you for sharing that story. I think that’s inspiring for people to know that there are avenues here by which we can help people even with.

injuries like that where the general medical consensus is probably that you can’t do anything. And yet in this case, you were able to make profound progress there. So I hope people take from that some inspiration. As we sort of wind down on this conversation here, I want to go back to before I was asking you to go back into more depth on the acupuncture piece, you had…

left off on the topic of unprocessed emotions and how that is a demand or a drain on energy. And so I think it’s probably the last topic we can cover for this conversation, but there is a lot more that I know we could talk about, so perhaps we’ll have to do a part two at some point.

but unprocessed emotions. So I’m gonna talk about this. Back on episode 60 of our show, I did a solo episode talking about trauma and it was inspired by the book, The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Vander Kolk. And, you know.

Garrett Salpeter (01:27:56.338)
One of the themes that I really like and I think is congruent with this here. So I want to mention this to you. You can let me know if you agree, disagree. Then I think you’ll be able to expand on it as well and be able to bring us to a nice conclusion about how to address it. But essentially, my theory, hypothesis would be that we react to

psychologically traumatic events, just the same as we do to physically traumatic events, where we sort of brace against them. And those patterns of bracing can be held in patterns of physical tension in the body. And then tying back to this conversation, of course, holding physical patterns of tension and contraction uses up energy, right? So that’s one of the avenues by which we’re constantly draining energy. And

Then if we could use a tool like the Nubie, for example, to scan around and find where that pattern of tension is being held, it can give us an avenue whereby we can possibly free up that pattern of tension. I have some question as to whether or not one actually needs to talk about the thing that happened. If you could just release it and have it be gone.

without necessarily having to consciously address and talk about it or whether you have to. So that’s sort of one question of, does the, is that a fair description of how patterns of tension are held in the body in response to even psychological trauma, if not also physical? And then.

in terms of addressing it, what’s your best approach, kind of best thinking if we could tie a bow on that in terms of how to effectively address it and along the way, do you have to consciously address, as in like talk through with a counselor what happened or is it possible to sort of move past it without necessarily having to deal with it? And obviously you don’t wanna be ignoring or suppressing anything, but can you,

Garrett Salpeter (01:29:55.85)
in your experience, kind of get through it without necessarily having to consciously talk about it. I guess there’s a few questions layered in there, but I know you have some good thoughts on this topic and I’m eager to hear what you have to say, especially in light of the last discussion topics.

Wesley Kress (01:30:10.378)
Yeah, the best way of understanding this sort of relationship is to bring in animals. So like animals have trauma and they don’t necessarily have a mind, but they do have thoughts. They do have emotions and they certainly have a nervous system. And so in terms of like, do they have to process at the level of the intellect? I would say no. The.

reason to process at the level of the intellect is it can further facilitate a sense of safety and clarity and wisdom extraction from some situations. But it’s not necessary per se for the healing to take place.

So animals in the same way like, and what I define as a mind, a mind is sort of like a forward projection and a back projection. And it’s also a conceptual model. It’s everything we’re talking about, like our minds are beating here and we’re having this sort of conversation. But below that is reality happening.

nature of the nervous system, the physiology, biology, psychology, neurology. And so an animal, for instance, has trauma. It sort of like uses different mechanisms of shaking and or, you know, moving into different patterns of release. And in fact, the reason they don’t have the mind is the reason they don’t have the same issues that humans have is that there is no inhibiting force.

to not express or feel those emotions.

Wesley Kress (01:31:52.526)
from the trauma itself. And this leads to the fact that, why do people do meditation is actually drops below the level of the mind and into the nervous system so that you can process. Or why do people use, more or less what we’ve seen more recently is psychedelics. Psychedelics are the ability to go below the layer of the mind and actually feel the trauma, which is the emotions behind that.

And so whether or not they have a narrative or a story, it doesn’t really matter. It’s the same way that like, if you and I were watching the Chicago Bulls versus the Phoenix Suns, and you were watching it on the broadcast of the Chicago Bulls, and I was watching it on the broadcast of the Phoenix Suns, right? Like the same game is happening, but we both are getting different narratives from the broadcasting. And the broadcasting is similar to the egoic structure or the mind.

It has a different story as to what took place. But what people are trying to get to is the nature of healing. They’re not actually trying to get to a better story. In the same way that like, if you have a cut on your shoulder and I go touch it and it’s wide open, you’re gonna bat me away, just naturally.

In the same way, psychologically or emotionally, if you have that within the nervous system, that you’ve had some trigger or trauma that’s unprocessed and it gets triggered, you may lash out, you may react or so forth. But what you’re reacting to is the unprocessed pain.

And you can always tell to the degree of someone’s healed is because of the degree at which they can talk about the memory, because you still have the memory of these things, but you don’t have the pain. People are trying to actually process the pain, which is emotional pain, and has very neurological, biological impacts. They’re not trying to actually change the memory. That’s where traditional psychology has a lot of limitations. With that said, there is some…

Wesley Kress (01:34:05.918)
relationship there, right? This is not binary in nature. So if you create a reframing, a recontextualization, someone might feel a little bit better, but this all comes back to the degrees of magnitude of the trauma and the nature of the development of the nervous system. So if you traumatize a young child who’s four years old, where the nervous system of the brain are very underdeveloped, right? Your level of damage…

is extraordinarily and exponentially higher than if you do that to a grown mature nervous system. Right? And so that’s why childhood trauma is

way more impactful and if you look at adverse childhood events, there is a the largest study ever done on that has a extremely high correlation to autoimmune and chronic disease and it’s all to do with this because the child doesn’t have the ability to cope on a biological level.

And certainly not on a psychological level in terms of reframing or contextualizing, right? If something happens to you when you’re an adult, you can already start to exceed from other perspective. But if you have it happen as a child, you don’t have that capacity. So there is a direct relationship of orders of magnitude in terms of the one side, which is the development of the nervous system.

the degrees of how much did that trauma take place, meaning was it consistent, was it just once, because that’s how much energy was going towards the degree of change at the nervous system. And that, in order, will change the magnitude of pathology and compensation, because all pathophysiology is a compensation away from physiology.

Garrett Salpeter (01:36:02.64)
Mm-hmm.

Wesley Kress (01:36:03.726)
So it’s like we focus all on the pathophysiology, but the physiology is actually where the most understanding needs to be derived because everything is a compensation. And we see this in orthopedic medicine. Like we don’t, we know that everyone compensates different from an injury in their ankle, right? We wouldn’t necessarily see that as problematic or wrong, but our job is to sort of…

first change the level of pain, because pain in itself is a compensation of its own sort of pathophysiology, you could say, but it was a compensation away from that trauma. So we have to get to that layer, and that’s one of the things that Newbie does so effectively, is it reduces this better than anything possible. And once you reduce this, you have free up so much energy in the system for change on a more systemic level.

right, to actually re-teach the nervous system how to get back in the normal physiological mechanisms of proper gait, proper joint position, proper center of mass. And that’s, you know, similar where we have to do in terms of trauma is we have to be able to get the individual to process the pain. It just so happens that the mind itself narrows its focus as an avoidance of that pain.

So it’s not that the pain doesn’t still exist and there’s not resources going to it, but.

Wesley Kress (01:37:39.21)
you don’t actually know it’s there. It’s kind of like if you had a noise on the refrigerator and it’s kind of like this buzzing noise and all of a sudden your mind contracts away from it, meaning it’s still there, but the attention has moved away from it. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t, it isn’t still happening.

Garrett Salpeter (01:38:00.442)
Mm-hmm.

Wesley Kress (01:38:00.81)
And so the majority of what’s happening in the nature of a collective or chronic trauma is there’s chronic stress at the nature of the nervousism, but the mind has contracted as attention away from it. And so when you use body scanning, like for Pasana and meditation, or use psychedelics, it removes the resistance of the mind, which is actually trying to take you as far away from the pain as possible, right? From a compensation standpoint, so that you can actually come back to it, process it.

process it, then of course, like talking about it doesn’t matter because what you were trying to avoid was the pain itself. You know, it’s like you have that wound on your arm that we were talking about. If it heals and I go touch it, you’re not going to bat me. You might even tell me, hey, look at this, like this happened X, Y, and Z. You have no issue with sharing the memory. So the layer at the level of the intellect, which is the mind, which is most therapy is just talk therapy.

Garrett Salpeter (01:38:38.354)
Mm-hmm.

Garrett Salpeter (01:38:52.594)
moment.

Wesley Kress (01:39:00.114)
it’s having an impact on everything. But to think that someone could spend 30, 40, 50 years just talking about the story and recontextualizing and think that the magnitude.

of pain, if it was enormous enough, like it’s not going to make a dent, right? For less significant magnitudes of trauma, it’s probably more effective, right? In terms of getting closer to resolution. But the therapies that all seem to work in more significant traumas like EMD armor or things as you’re dropping below the level of the mind and you’re actually accessing the nervous system, which actually is, is where reality is reality from a Dharma standpoint.

is your five senses, right? And those inputs, including the sixth one, which is thoughts that humans have that then construct a mind, and those generate reality. The mind is sort of layered on top of this.

It’s like a bug in the software, you might say, and at least people who are enlightened or have gone all the way to the furthest end. And so we sort of create a self on top of the authentic self, which is people refer to in circles as like the ego, but the ego is just evolutionary wire to help you survive. But you can’t get to safety through protection.

Garrett Salpeter (01:40:20.016)
Mm-hmm.

Wesley Kress (01:40:26.078)
It’s like you’re always in the contracted state. You have to actually go into the nature of experiencing safety directly, which is the only way to get there is to go in and through, which is to feel the pain so that it processes and then the nervous system can actually feel safe again. And then the egoic structure.

Garrett Salpeter (01:40:29.307)
Right.

Wesley Kress (01:40:48.606)
doesn’t need to protect you from it. And it’s not that the, it’s just sort of like, you’ve seen past the illusion at that point. And that’s why you can have these, like people who have these massive shifts in the nature of their personality. But one of the things that psychedelics do is that they open you up beyond what you know you don’t know.

and we see this on personality scales, is that one standard deviation on the scale of openness changes permanently. And that opening is what creates a critical period of reorganization and relearning at the nature of the nervous system and the brain. And that in itself is a much more significant change because that’s a changing of more in relationship to the operating system.

then it is sort of one of the apps built on top of it, which would be the mind. The mind is given so much attention, but it is absolutely a small part of reality, right? Like it’s like a contracted version of it. And so, yeah.

Garrett Salpeter (01:41:54.702)
Mm-hmm. So I think just to kind of guide this along here, I think that is an excellent answer to this question of how to essentially address trauma and how the mind is and is not relevant to that, how it’s ultimately a bodily experience. I think…

The psychedelics conversation, there’s a lot there. I don’t think, I think we do have to wrap up here. So I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily, I don’t necessarily wanna open that can of worms because it would take us much longer to fully unpack that and dive in. But other than just to foreshadow and say that is a way to, that is a way to, it could be an accelerator on this process of getting through the mind to these underlying experiences here. So.

Wesley Kress (01:42:30.676)
Yeah.

Garrett Salpeter (01:42:50.382)
I just, I wanna stop us before we go too far down that road because it would be a whole other topic that would demand some more time to adequately address. And I just, I don’t think we’re gonna be able to do that right now, but this was some excellent ground. This is one that I assure you, I’m gonna go back and re-listen to because.

Every time you and I talk, I have new insights, new understandings. It’s one of those things you can go back and read the same book, but as a different person, it’ll hit you differently. There’s a little bit of that, but then also, I’m a different person listening, you’re a different person sharing the information. There’s more experiences and different things that we’ve both had since then too. So I personally am very excited to.

go back and re-listen this. I hope everyone listening got some new understanding and insights out of this one and ones that are actionable too. So I really like that. If you ever write a book, I’ll say I will happily promote it by many copies to gift to other people. So take that as encouragement to write a book. But if people want to follow you on social media or look up your website, Wes, where are the best places to…

Find you follow along see what you’re up to possibly interact

Wesley Kress (01:44:09.774)
Yeah, so the website brea and then on Instagram, it’s actually brea And yeah, those are the main two spots that people can find me, interact. And yeah, the nature of all those things are coming. There’s been…

sort of I started this journey when I was seven years old after having significant amount of trauma and it’s taken me 28 years of going through really deep depths of contraction and confusion at the level of the mind to then arrive and expansion of clarity. And that is, you know, they’re one in the same, right? It’s going back to the Chinese medicine model for one, you can’t have night without day and you can’t have.

You can’t have clarity without first going through the layers of confusion. And I think a lot of us are trying to understand the nature of reality through all sorts of different models. And then some models are more actionable than others as a result of affecting change. And that’s what we’re all trying to do is affect change by getting back to the nature of…

our authentic self, which is essentially has no issues. And we have to unwind all the issues that came as a result of the trauma. And everyone actually has some degree of this, even though they may not understand that. And it’s just difference of magnitude. And that difference of magnitude determines whether or not it shows up in the physiology, because that is the density of energy is different. And so the order of change

is different but that was the whole model of Chinese medicine you had Jin, Qi and Shen and so Shen would be equivalent to like thoughts and emotions more ethereal in nature but they were still actually very much relatable back to something of significance as it relates to phenomena so just because you can’t measure something it doesn’t matter and just because something matters

Wesley Kress (01:46:18.414)
doesn’t mean it can be measured, meaning our instruments are somewhat limited to the nature of what we can understand about reality. And when we have breakthroughs in that, we have shifts in understanding. But many people are looking through finite paradigms of understanding and the model of Chinese medicine actually gives us the closest understanding to affect change

Wesley Kress (01:46:47.808)
the whole which healing is actually derived from the word wholeness.

Garrett Salpeter (01:46:54.362)
Yes, a good, excellent note, how much to add, and tying it back to healing and the themes at the beginning here. And everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. I hope you got as much out of this as I did. Wes, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience and wisdom. And…

This was really, really profound here. So a lot about, you know, of course things we can do to help various patients and clients. But I think this really gets to the core work of, you know, that we need to really live a successful life, if you can call it that, or to, you know, to really get a glimpse of what true happiness is or enlightenment is, you know, where happiness is not, of course.

If I achieve this or buy that, you know, then I’ll be happy. Right. It’s, it’s that sense of peace that just comes from baseline level of existence. And like you said, we have to unwind a lot in order to get there. So I think this was very profound. Uh, thanks again, everyone for tuning in. Thanks again, Wes for being here and we will see you everybody on the next episode of the undercurrent podcast.