Chris: Steve, thanks so much for joining us today.

Steve: Oh, I’m glad to be here, Chris. Like a lot of kids I probably felt something, and often we are trained not to say anything or sometimes we’ll say what we feel like, “I’m hot” and somebody will say, “Oh no you’re not, keep your sweater on,” so a lot of us learned really early on not to speak up. But one night I was sitting at the dining room table and my dad came home and wanted to buy a business, he was all excited, he was just so tired of working so hard and long as an underpaid manager, and my mom like most people worried about security, she basically nixed the idea. And I just kept feeling something in my body wanting to blurt out and all of a sudden I couldn’t take it anymore, it came through, coursed through my whole body, I said, “Daddy is a miracle, he can do it, let him buy it.” I was probably about 12 or less. I shout that and the beauty of that is they went the next day and looked, and know actually my dad did buy the store. And a week after he bought it there was a national food strike or at least a state food strike and all the big supermarkets closed, and my dad had lines around the corner. Thank goodness that I had that instinct and spoke up, and had (Inaudible: 01:26). Of course he did it but I think I was definitely part of it by feeling something and not holding it in. So I think it really did help me say “Wow, what would have happened if I would have kept that communication in, like most of us?” Hold it in my body. I’m not saying I cautiously got it as much as I did as an adult. I started working with people in advertising and sales and promotion and different things I was doing, and I noticed people weren’t breathing. I noticed when someone would say one thing their body gave another message and I said hmm something’s off. They’re saying they’re happy but their fist is closed or they’re saying they have a great product but their heads down, and I started then going more into studying body centered therapy, and semantics, and just learning more about why that we say one thing but our body gives off another message. Every one of us has beliefs to what I call viral beliefs. Things that happened in our life where either it was traumatic or just something happened that was uncomfortable, and we held our breath, we enrolled our body to hold on to something. And as our result it became a pattern and we started having beliefs that were coming through our body. For instance, a guy tells me he wants to have a successful business. Okay, say out loud what you want. I want to have a…and couldn’t even get the word successful out. And a long story short, as I had him go into his body and really breath, and listen to what his body was telling him not his mind, he had what I would call somatic recall or a memory where when he was young, he was taught from his father. He would say, “Dad, why do other kids get toys on Christmas and I don’t?” And his dad taught him, “Oh, toys, they cost money, son; and to make a lot of money you got to get sick.” So that’s of the least that was taught to him at a young age. His mind forgot about it but when you saw him and he started to tell you about his business, his body gave off a message like stay away. So, what I would call the belief is, if I’m successful I’ll get sick.

Chris: Right.

Steve: And as a result, when he’s ready to talk to you about his product or service, in a way he’s afraid you’re going to say yes because he might get sick. Now his mind doesn’t know that but his body was there from day one, his body has a memory, and the body can be an amazing place for us to find out where these belief systems live and show us what we hold within us. The last time we went out on a date we got rejected. If we’re not aware of it we could walk in the next time we have a first date kind of meek and our head down, and we’re talking confidently with words but our body’s basically saying, “Oh, I don’t want to get hurt again.” Oh I think so many people are afraid to express themselves. I’m constantly hearing no matter what the story is, where people just got caught in patterns. Like this one woman who said who said “nobody ever wants to hear me,” and as she went into her body she got in touch with when she was younger how at the table when she would be talking, her brother would interrupt her and her parents allowed it. So she started to get this feeling, this evidence really, this belief that nobody wants to hear from me. The scary thing is that like many of us we'll do self fulfilling prophecy meaning, she'll be sitting with you, and this is what she identified, and the curtains starting to open for a show, and she'll say to you, “Hey let me tell you what happened today” and he'll go, “oh, not right now, the show’s starting.” See nobody wants to hear what I have to say. So when you wind up getting so caught in the pattern its familiar. You know Chris, about 70 percent of the people who won the California lottery when they used to give it out all at once, like one million dollars at once, lost it the first year. I think it's in the body. I think their body was familiar with being broke, with being poor, with struggling, with being upset. And they got all that money, it was like their body couldn't take it and at some unconscious level they did whatever it took to get back to that familiar, kind of suffering place because that was more comfortable in their body. So my book has a lot of techniques as ways for us to make the body more comfortable; be able to take something in life. As I get successful I will be healthy instead of the body right now is saying, “Boy if I get successful, I'm going to get sick.” We can consciously change that. The first thing I tell people is separate the fact from the fiction. A guy calls me, says “my company has downsized me.” Okay. “I'm going to lose my job; I'm going to lose my health coverage.” Wait, wait, wait, that's fiction. What's true is your company’s downsizing and what’s true is you’re afraid. Let’s feel into your body around that fear. Let’s breathe and see if we can alleviate that fear. And the mind will take us spinning. And I always say to people really be careful where your mind will take you. So the first thing to do is say, “Wow, let me separate the facts from the fiction so I don’t drag myself into more anxiety by making up stories.” And then secondly, start to get in touch with your body. Start to take some really deep, full belly breathes so that you can make a connection between your body and your breath; your body and your mind, by breathing. And then from there do a full body scale from head to toe to notice what is like, “ah, I’m nervous,” or “I’m still holding on to something from the morning, I’m tightening my grip.” Whatever it is, take a deep breath, acknowledge what that is, and then take some action. It might mean taking a big exhale. It might mean shaking your hand out the tension out of your fist. It might mean calling somebody you had the argument with that morning, you’re still feeling it on your chest. So I think it’s important for us to be careful of where the mind takes us. And that’s why I’ve taking people into the body so they can actually get in touch with the true anxiety and do something about it, like breathing, moving, telling truth, calling someone, verses holding it in and having it build even more. Then often it will make it happen. If that guy would have kept worrying enough he might not have gone to work, he might have gotten sick, he might have caused himself to get fired. But instead he got in touch with the anxiety. And actually Chris, it's in my book; it’s a true story. He actually turned out and wound up making a resume that day versus going home and feeling terrible, or like a lot of us do, getting in the bed, or getting drunk, or who knows what people do to just avoid that pain. He actually got empowered once he realized he was making up all the stories, once he breathed, and moved, and shook out that initial fear, he then got proactive and made a resume and actually got himself a new job.

Chris: And so Steve, in What’s Your Body Telling You, you actually show people like how to go through the process of getting more in touch with their body.

Steve: Thank you. Well actually I have several techniques in there where people actually do get more in touch with their body, shaking out beliefs and separate the facts from the fiction. Get in touch with the stress and anxiety, and relieve it. I also talk about why and how we got to get out of our bodies more often. And I also give a lot of inquires where you can go into your own body and learn things about your biography, things that you held onto from your past. Wow, how do you breathe? You can take a B.Q. test; in other words it’s the I.Q. You can take a test to see how intelligent is my body; how much am I connected to my awareness? And then I apply it throughout the book to each area of life; life purpose, career, relationships, and health. Well, it’s self-evident truth which short would call set because like I said, a lot of us really were discouraged or told we don’t know what we feel. “Gee I’m hot!” “No you’re not.” “I want to take my sweater off.” “Don’t take it off; it’s not hot in here.” That teaches us, "Well maybe I don’t really know what I feel." So I call it your self-evident truth because nobody can argue with it. If you know you’re hot, you’re hot. So when somebody says to you, “here’s a new assignment today” and your belly gets tight, you could feel like and go “wow, I know what my body feels.” The self-evident truth exercise basically is five steps. Real quickly, step one is taking a moment to really determine and commit to I’m going to go within. I’m going to turn off the computer, I’m going to close my eyes, or if I’m driving I’m going to turn off the radio. I’m just going to take a moment and get in touch with my self-evident truth. What’s my whole body experience in this moment? The next step is to take some deep belly breaths and notice the quality of your breathing. That starts the body and the mind connecting. Gee, I’m not breathing, or oh, I’m breathing from my belly, or I’m breathing from my chest, or I’m noticing when I breathe, it’s hard to breathe in but easy to breath out. Just have a serious of questions with your breath. Then a scan from head to toe, to find out what is. Are my shoulders tight, am I gripping my jaw, am I shaking my hand nervously? What’s really going on for me at this moment? Say out load or to yourself, I’m noticing my body is scared, I’m noticing my back is tight, I’m noticing I’m holding the wheel tight. And take another deep breath and take some action. Release it, relieve it, make that phone call to that person if you still have something on your chest. So it’s basically something you could do at any moment. I did it before we got on the call today. Basically I do it before I walk into a presentation, before I give a speech. It helps me get set so I can be in my whole body not just my mind. And if there is any tension going on I can connect with it, and I can relieve it at the same time. For more interviews on health, mind, body, and spirit, go to Michael Senoff’s

Chris: How many people do you think that are out there are working just in their head?

Steve: Oh yeah, well I think most people, they’ll be driving to work holding the wheel, gripping it, gritting their jaw, shaking their leg, and they have no idea. And they get to work and they go, “oh I got the worst headache,” so it’s pretty rampant that most of us, we’re watching computers, we’re in our text, we’re thinking about something that happened earlier, something that’s going to happen later, and we’re not really connected in our body. And I’m just finding that’s why the title of the book is What’s Your Body Telling You. Because, I’m finding so many people have come to me and said, “I’ve been going at the same problem but I just can’t get to it in my mind.” And Einstein has this great quote; you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. So I always ask the question: “Well, let’s see what your body’s telling you.” And we have ways to get in there, whether it’s over the phone, or in a work shop, or one on one, where I help people get in touch with what’s really going on inside. When I say I want to be a successful artist, why does my chest collapse? When I say “I’m wanting to create a new relationship,” why do I tighten up? And the body will give you those answers so that you can change the direction. You can actually have a better result once you’re in touch with what might be holding you back; what’s living in your body. Body was there from day one. I mean I’ve seen so much in my practice of people contacting memories, contacting even as early as the womb or birth experiences, things that happened that just stayed in their body and then get activated. I call it a, like a belief, like a virus, a viral belief, things that are in your system that are dormant. Maybe it was a shock, maybe it was embarrassment in front of your whole class, maybe it was an abuse. Something happened, you held your breath, held your body, did everything you could to fantasize or get out of it, or do a pill, whatever it took to get out of the pain, yet it’s still in the body. It didn’t get a chance to release itself, or express itself. So, that when somebody says something or some event is similar to the old event, our body will remember and actually act out. I can give you my own example; I remember when I went on T.V. I’m a pretty confident guy, I love being on the media, I love talking about what I do, and when they called my name and said you’ll be on in a few minutes I noticed I started sweating profusely and I had total anxiety in my body. I’m like, what’s going on here? And as I started to breathe Chris, and really feel into where that anxiety was coming from, I put my hand on it. I could see myself; I could feel myself as a young boy living in a safe, close knit, family oriented neighborhood, and the first time a few of my cousins and I went out we got beat up by a bunch of guys from another neighborhood, and we ran home! And in me, always lived a place that said boy if I go too far it’s not safe. Now who knew years later I’d be walking out to a big T.V. audience and have that feeling come back. But I think a lot of us do. A lot of people I work with are entertainers, are speakers, and they go, “Boy, when I get up to speak sometimes I get really nervous, and as I tune into my body I still am holding on to that time when I got up in my first speech, in my first grade class, and everybody laughed at me.”

Chris: Yes.

Steve: Still in my body that people might laugh at me. I have very thin people that tell me they’re fat. I go, “you’re not fat.” They go, “Well, I know I’m not when I look in the mirror but I feel it, it’s in my body because all the years’ kids laughed at me.”

Chris: And so when people connect with that what happens?

Steve: Well again, they separate the past from your present, and they can do something about it. They can start to work, like I can be successful, I can be healthy, I actually can lose weight. A lot of people I work with, with losing weight, often stuff will come up and a lot of women say “when I was perfectly fit I got tired of guys bugging me.” Some of them had worse experiences so they’ll get in touch will something and go “wow, no wonder I put on this extra weight.” So, it wasn’t so much about eating, it was a form of protection. Well that was then, and now I actually don’t have to do that. I can actually beast it and work with my body, and know that I’ll be safe. And you start to rewire your thinking, like my case, I can go out in front of a big audience and rewire, not just in my mind like positive affirmation but in my body. Through breathing, and breathing it in, I am safe. And then my body relaxes and then I am. Nobody beat me up on stage and nobody was going to but hey, there’s a little kid in all of us that has a lot of memories. It does live in the body. If it wasn’t expressed where did it go; that’s the question. And usually it just got stored in the body. It could cause a lot of health problems. I work with a lot of people who have asthma and things like that. I’m not a doctor but people who would say “I had asthma since I was eight years old,” and then we’ll trace back in the body the source. Like when this woman’s grandfather died and she wanted to scream at God and say, “Why did you take him?” and her parents said “oh, no, no. He’s happy in heaven. Don’t you scream.” And then the next day she goes to the funeral and she’s wanting to cry, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. Grandpa won’t want you to cry.” She holds it all in, two days later she’s diagnosed with asthma. I was the first person to encourage her; scream it out, yell it out. Do what you didn’t get to do. I always say to people, “Back then you couldn’t express that because your parents wouldn’t let you. Now you can.” And you know the truth is Chris, when she started expressing out, “I’m angry. I’m angry my grandfather,” all of a sudden she’s breathing better. She’s clearing an obstruction that she held onto for 30 years. It was unbelievable! And she actually called me and said, “You wouldn’t believe it, I’m actually breathing so much better now.” I said, “Well that was something you were told to hold in and you did, and it was traumatic, and you held it in your lungs, and you held it in your body, and now you got to breathe it out and express it out.” And she had a restorance of life force of energy and basically released a lot of that block in her chest. I’m hoping that people will read my book and get the message that I’m doing on the radio, and T.V., and everywhere else. That it’s really important to allow our children to feel, and if they say the bath is hot don’t run your hand it in then say, “it’s not hot because your hands not feeling hot,” listen to them. If they say it’s hot, it’s probably hot. I raised my son that way; that I listened to him and I encouraged him to express out. I think a lot of our problems today with kids is that they’re holding too much in. Then they have a lot of problems, or teen suicides, or never been hired. Kids are holding a lot of stuff in and they just can’t take it anymore. It’s too much for their body, too much for their mind.

Chris: So you had some experiences with the Dalai Lama.

Steve: Like a lot of us, I woke up Chris and I had a lot of tension, and I was kind of lost at that time in my life, just looking at what’s going on with my life. So I started to go on this fiction like, oh maybe I’m having a heart attack, maybe I don’t have a purpose. And the long story short, I started to breathe and feel, and notice that in me there was a great desire and need to take a break from what I was doing, and just go on a little journey. I kept asking where and I kept feeling in my body and hearing the words India. And I didn’t want to go to India; that’s not where I wanted to go. So I just went down to the India Embassy to feel it out, and I saw a sign that said get your Malaria shots. And I said, “Okay, I’m not going to India,” so I drove home. The next day I felt it again, so I went down and got my visa, and a day later I was on an airplane, I had no idea why or where. I just got off at Bombay; very far from where the Dalai Lama lives. And I got a hotel room and the next day I woke up and I saw a bunch of people living in cardboard boxes, and I said, “Wow, maybe that’s why I came here, to appreciate more, see how transparent life is.” And all of a sudden a herd of cows came across the street and disrupted a wedding procession. And I thought to myself, isn’t that something. Those cows walked wherever they wanted. That was there instinct to walk right through the wedding procession, and they didn’t care. Not only from a (Inaudible: 17:51), but I got this sense that, what would it be like for me to just walk through India, wherever my body wants to take me? Really practice what I preach. So the next day I wake up and I start to walk down the street and just practice experimenting, and listen to what my body is telling me. And it’s pulling me down this alley. My mind says no because I see a bunch of seeks with wild dogs, but my body’s pulling me down this alley anyway. I walked down the alley and there’s a gentleman standing there, and he says to me, “Come here,” and I said “Okay”. He says “Dalai Lama.” Hmm, Dalai Lama? “Dalai Lama.” And then he points to his scooter and I got on. And ten minutes later I’m brought to a field and there’s about 15 Pervatin monks sitting in a circle and in the middle is the Dalai Lama. And I was brought to the Dalai Lama, and I got so inspired and had so much purpose. So two days in India I got what I came for, had a bunch of miracles that month, but basically following my instincts took me to what people spend their lives trying to meet with the Dalai Lama. So, my message is, follow your instincts. Listen more to what your body’s telling you. You just never know where it’s going to take you. This was probably about nine, ten years ago I left.

Chris: Wow, and what did he say?

Steve: He was speaking about doing yourself and that even though the Chinese have done what they did to his people that he never wanted to become violent or like them. Just listen to your own guidance, stay in love, always model who you are. And it just brought me to a place of first of all, wow, look what happened; look at the miracles that are available if I really trust that I’m guided and I listen. If you can sit with anybody who would it be? I’m sure I would have picked the Dalia Lama; right up at the top one or three. So it just reminded me that he can stay in a place of his purpose, and his love, and his peace, no matter what people outside are doing.

Chris: That is just remarkable! If our listeners want to hear more about Steve Sisgold and his phenomenal book, What’s Your Body Telling You, you can go to his website at OneDream.com; O.N.E.D.R.E.A.M. dot com.

Steve: Thank you, Chris. Well, I’d just like to remind people that your body is your ally even though it hurts sometimes, or maybe it doesn’t look the way you want it to. There’s tremendous information and knowledge, and an opportunity. Before you make an investment, before you make a decision when somebody’s talking to you, start to listen to what’s my body telling me, so you don’t have to go on an automatic behavior and just react the way you think your mind wants to.