Thomas Wurm’s journey from wildland firefighter to trauma healing practitioner represents a powerful testament to the transformative potential of holistic wellness approaches. After fourteen years battling some of the most intense fires on the frontlines, Wurm experienced a devastating personal loss that shattered his understanding of strength and resilience.
Working as a wildland firefighter meant enduring extreme physical and mental stress. Wurm describes the experience as equivalent to riding the Tour de France every single day for two weeks straight, combined with sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, and temperatures reaching 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The job demanded pushing past physical and mental breaking points repeatedly. Yet beneath this external toughness, Wurm was accumulating unprocessed emotional trauma that his body was storing as physical tension and dysfunction.
The turning point came when talk therapy alone proved insufficient for addressing his deep-seated pain. Wurm discovered that emotions trapped in the body require more than verbal processing to release. Through acupuncture, he experienced his first physiological breakthrough. His body began shaking as trauma was literally leaving his system. This moment of hope sparked a comprehensive healing journey incorporating mental and emotional release techniques, hypnosis, Huna practices, and Qigong.
What makes Wurm’s approach distinctive is his understanding that pain often lives deeper than words can reach. He recognized that childhood imprints and ancestral patterns create the foundation for how we respond to trauma. When five people experience the same accident but only one develops PTSD, Wurm explains, something in that event triggered a deeper childhood wound. The new trauma connects with old trauma, creating a larger gestalt of unprocessed pain.
Today, Wurm works with clients using a detailed personal history process that identifies patterns across their entire life. Rather than treating isolated symptoms, he searches for the root cause connecting everything. His sessions involve two to four hours of careful listening, followed by intensive release work using mental and emotional techniques, hypnosis, and forgiveness processes rooted in Huna philosophy. The final stage focuses on integration, helping clients translate abstract insights into concrete behavioral changes.
Wurm’s message resonates powerfully: healing from trauma requires addressing both conscious and unconscious patterns. Shame, burnout, and feelings of unworthiness can run entire systems until they are cleared at their source. His work demonstrates that the mind-body connection is fundamental to recovery, and that true healing happens when we stop treating symptoms and start addressing root causes.
https://www.mountainmindmastery.com/
0:00 Welcome to Supernormalized with Thomas Wurm
1:36 Life as a Wildland Firefighter
2:49 The Hidden Toll of Constant Stress
13:34 Emotions Trapped in the Physical Body
14:04 First Acupuncture Experience and Breakthrough
22:49 Conscious Mind vs. Unconscious Mind Work
23:21 Childhood Trauma and PTSD Connections
24:24 Root-Cause Healing Beyond Symptoms
30:24 Detailed Personal History Process
31:10 Mental and Emotional Release Techniques
32:09 Integration Work and Future Pacing
Transcript
0:00 CeeJay Barnaby: Today on Supernormalized, I’m talking with Thomas Worm.
0:02 CeeJay Barnaby: He brings a story that moves from the fire line to the front lines of healing.
0:07 CeeJay Barnaby: After 14 years as a wildland firefighter, a devastating personal loss shattered everything he thought was strength.
0:13 CeeJay Barnaby: And what followed was a full body, mind and spiritual crisis that pushed him to the edge of life itself.
0:20 CeeJay Barnaby: From that breaking point, Thomas found a path through acupuncture, NLP, mental and emotional release, Huna, Qigong, and deep inner work that helped him recover what talk therapy alone could not reach.
0:34 CeeJay Barnaby: This conversation goes into what happens when pain lives deeper than words and why root cause of…
0:39 CeeJay Barnaby: healing matters and how patterns like shame, burnout, and feeling unlovable can ruin and run a whole system until they are cleared.
0:47 CeeJay Barnaby: Stay tuned to be able to hear the moment everything cracked open for Thomas and how he uses those tools and that greater understanding to help others now find their way through trauma and have their own healing process.
1:02 CeeJay Barnaby: Enjoy.
1:06 CeeJay Barnaby: Welcome to Supernormalized, Thomas Worm.
1:09 CeeJay Barnaby: Thomas, you’ve had some rather intense life challenges that pretty much broke open a new path for you.
1:19 CeeJay Barnaby: And we’re here to talk about that today and then how you work with people.
1:23 CeeJay Barnaby: Welcome to the show.
1:23 Thomas Wurm: Thank you so much for having me.
1:25 Thomas Wurm: I’m excited to be here with you all and just to share my story and just to share, I guess, the inspiration, how much my life has changed throughout the years.
1:33 Thomas Wurm: So yeah, I’m excited to be here.
1:34 Thomas Wurm: Thank you.
1:35 Thomas Wurm: Okay.
1:36 CeeJay Barnaby: All right.
1:36 CeeJay Barnaby: So what was life for you as a wildland firefighter?
1:39 CeeJay Barnaby: I mean, that’s a pretty intense sort of job.
1:41 CeeJay Barnaby: It’s like you’re on the edge of danger almost continuously just to do your work.
1:47 CeeJay Barnaby: And what did that environment teach you about strength?
1:51 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, it’s such a powerful environment.
1:54 Thomas Wurm: And I don’t think people realize that it’s like riding a tour to France every single day for 14 days straight with lack of sleep, with poor food, plus a whole bunch of stress and a lot of heat usually.
2:08 Thomas Wurm: Usually, yeah, it might be 105 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but also you’re right next to the line.
2:13 Thomas Wurm: So you could be working in like 130 degrees, right?
2:15 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
2:17 Thomas Wurm: there’s just so much stress on top of stress from a physical, mental, there’d be times on the line where like, I’m breaking down that I just can’t go any farther.
2:26 Thomas Wurm: Like, I think I’m like, I’ve hit this wall.
2:28 Thomas Wurm: And that’s like 10am, right?
2:30 Thomas Wurm: You know what I mean?
2:31 Thomas Wurm: So I never thought I could push this hard or go this far in my life.
2:35 Thomas Wurm: And so it just blew my mind on how strong and powerful one the mind is, but also the body.
2:42 CeeJay Barnaby: Looking back, what did you miss at the time that told you your system was already under too much strain?
2:49 Thomas Wurm: There was no time to stop.
2:50 Thomas Wurm: For me, I guess there’s, again, so much stress from the job, but also when you start doing two weeks upon two weeks upon two weeks out there on the line, you have two days off.
3:00 Thomas Wurm: And you’re out in the wilderness, like you don’t see your family.
3:02 Thomas Wurm: You don’t have the phone calls.
3:04 Thomas Wurm: You get really lonely from a family perspective.
3:08 Thomas Wurm: But a camaraderie comes in and really saves you.
3:10 Thomas Wurm: But I think that lack of emotional connection in my relationships with my family, like that was…
3:16 Thomas Wurm: I think how strained my personal relationships were getting just from work, just from being gone.
3:22 Thomas Wurm: You know, I missed every of my best friend’s weddings.
3:25 Thomas Wurm: You know, I missed so much things because I was out there fighting fire.
3:29 Thomas Wurm: So I think how much I felt like I missed out in some ways, although we were doing awesome stuff, right?
3:35 Thomas Wurm: So it’s just very different lifestyle, right?
3:39 Thomas Wurm: And I think the nonstop going, going, going,
3:43 Thomas Wurm: It just added up.
3:44 Thomas Wurm: It took me 10 years to realize like, wait a minute, I think I need to slow down here.
3:48 CeeJay Barnaby: Can you take us into your spontaneous out-of-body experience that you had and what that moment felt like for you from the inside?
3:59 Thomas Wurm: Oh, yeah, yeah.
4:00 Thomas Wurm: So I’m going to give a little bit of context before I jump right into that.
4:03 Thomas Wurm: You know, right where I was at that time in my life, I had lost somebody really close to me in fire.
4:09 Thomas Wurm: And so about six months later, I really found myself in this, remember I’m in the firefighter, like alpha male, like really, I don’t even know what was happening to me really, but I was in this deep, deep grief stage.
4:23 Thomas Wurm: And so I would say there was a lot more stress, like lack of sleep, really high anxiety at this time.
4:30 Thomas Wurm: And on top of all like childhood trauma, but also fire trauma.
4:33 Thomas Wurm: So there’s just so many things stacking up and I was really having trouble sleeping.
4:38 Thomas Wurm: I was having
4:39 Thomas Wurm: really hard time at work at this point.
4:41 Thomas Wurm: And so I didn’t really know what to do.
4:42 Thomas Wurm: So I started meditating and I started, I would say meditating maybe an hour a day, but then I really just was having the worst time sleeping.
4:51 Thomas Wurm: So I started meditating three, four hours a day.
4:54 Thomas Wurm: Like if I couldn’t sleep, I would just meditate at night.
4:56 Thomas Wurm: And I found some of these Qigong meditations, uh, like microcosmic orbit and things that open up these channels that I really didn’t know what I was doing.
5:04 Thomas Wurm: That’s just because I was really just starting out with this stuff.
5:07 Thomas Wurm: And, uh,
5:08 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, I was just in a deep meditation.
5:10 Thomas Wurm: I just asked out loud, like, God, can you open my third eye?
5:13 Thomas Wurm: Right.
5:14 Thomas Wurm: And from that point, it really felt like what I call like a wind tunnel.
5:19 Thomas Wurm: Like, it just felt like there was so much air blasting me out of my body.
5:23 Thomas Wurm: It was super uncomfortable.
5:25 Thomas Wurm: It was honestly really terrifying.
5:28 Thomas Wurm: Because I really thought I was dying, for sure.
5:30 Thomas Wurm: It really felt like that was the end.
5:33 Thomas Wurm: And then I found myself above the earth.
5:36 Thomas Wurm: All of the molecules in my body were coming apart.
5:38 Thomas Wurm: It’s the best way I can describe it.
5:40 Thomas Wurm: And I’ve never smoked DMT, but I think it’s that same wind tunnel or bufo, that same thing that really launches you like a rocket ship out of your body.
5:49 Thomas Wurm: That was the experience I had, yeah.
5:51 CeeJay Barnaby: if you could describe yourself as Velcro, two pieces being pulled apart, it sort of feels like that.
5:55 CeeJay Barnaby: Everything, everything becomes so open that there is nothing that’s closed.
6:02 Thomas Wurm: At that point, it was like, this is nice.
6:04 Thomas Wurm: I’m at peace.
6:04 Thomas Wurm: This is like every, all of the terrifying and fear was gone at that point, which was amazing.
6:09 Thomas Wurm: And for me, I found myself really drawn towards the sun, almost like a moth.
6:14 Thomas Wurm: And so I just floated into the sun, right into the center of it.
6:18 Thomas Wurm: And it really opened up to these
6:21 Thomas Wurm: It was like a light trail to the next sun into the next solar system.
6:25 Thomas Wurm: I just kept following these trails from this sun to the next star to the next star.
6:30 Thomas Wurm: And eventually I just came to like our black hole in the Milky Way.
6:34 Thomas Wurm: And so I just went to the center of that.
6:36 Thomas Wurm: And there is another light trail that opened up to like the next black hole in the next.
6:39 Thomas Wurm: And so really at the end of the day, it was like I was just zooming out and just zooming out and zooming out until I could see like the whole thing.
6:47 Thomas Wurm: universe.
6:47 Thomas Wurm: And to me, it looked like I could see these sparks flying between these galaxies.
6:54 Thomas Wurm: And it just looked like neurology.
6:56 Thomas Wurm: Just the full panoramic view of neurology.
6:58 Thomas Wurm: And for me, it was like this voice came over and just
7:02 Thomas Wurm: said to me like this is this is the universe it’s pure consciousness and at that point just was slammed back down in my body and it was really shocking and all those things I was going through at that time in my life the stress the sleep and all of those physical things I was going through as well
7:18 Thomas Wurm: Everything got 100 times worse for me at that point because I really feel like my body got electrocuted.
7:23 Thomas Wurm: That’s really what it felt like.
7:25 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
7:26 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
7:27 CeeJay Barnaby: That’s wild.
7:28 CeeJay Barnaby: So when you’re going through that experience and you’re so open and then being pushed back into your body and realizing that the whole universe is conscious, how did that affect your understanding of who you are and your place in the cosmos?
7:41 CeeJay Barnaby: Did you actually have any faith or any religious or spiritual experience prior to that?
7:46 Thomas Wurm: Back when I was a teenager, I actually had a near-death experience and it wasn’t kind of this grand type thing.
7:53 Thomas Wurm: It was just kind of the nothingness, this void.
7:55 Thomas Wurm: When I was reading like Raymond Moody’s work and I was like, oh my God, I’m the one that went into the void, like the nothingness.
8:00 Thomas Wurm: It was so peaceful.
8:02 Thomas Wurm: But the thing is that my life changed so drastically at that time when I was a teenager.
8:06 Thomas Wurm: I really did go into reading Buddhism, Taoism, a lot of the Eastern philosophy.
8:12 Thomas Wurm: So that was more
8:13 Thomas Wurm: of my take on things.
8:15 Thomas Wurm: And it was something that really helped me as a teenager.
8:17 Thomas Wurm: You know, I did a lot of Tai Chi and Kung Fu and all of those things.
8:20 Thomas Wurm: And so I would say really come from like a Buddhist Taoist kind of philosophy at that time.
8:25 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, I think I started having experiences in the field on fires that were, I would say connected to that out of body experience, but I was really experiencing it in real time.
8:34 Thomas Wurm: And that’s when my gifts started happening.
8:36 Thomas Wurm: I would say just happen what’s happening to me right now.
8:39 CeeJay Barnaby: You know what I mean?
8:40 CeeJay Barnaby: What do you mean by gifts?
8:41 Thomas Wurm: There is times where we couldn’t really see the fire necessarily, like we’re hiking into it.
8:47 Thomas Wurm: And I find myself, found myself like spontaneously kind of tapping into the ground and like the mycelium and speaking to trees and asking trees to like go, can you talk to the tree that’s up on the hill and tell me what the fire is doing?
8:59 Thomas Wurm: And then I would get a message.
9:00 Thomas Wurm: And not that I was making tactical decisions on that, but I was getting intel from nature in a very different way than I had ever experienced.
9:08 Thomas Wurm: And at first, I was like, I think I’m a crazy person, right?
9:10 Thomas Wurm: I think anybody that has gifts is going to go through that process, right?
9:14 Thomas Wurm: I think I’m a crazy.
9:15 Thomas Wurm: And I would just say it really just started with hearing the natural world, but also just seeing different, seeing beyond the veil, really.
9:24 Thomas Wurm: I would say one of my big gifts is seeing energy, especially now.
9:27 Thomas Wurm: So it really was…
9:29 Thomas Wurm: It’s so interesting because I do see and I also hear messages sometimes, but I also feel so I kind of got all of them.
9:37 Thomas Wurm: You know, I think I opened up so wide in the out-of-body experience that I kind of got all the clairvoyance, if you will.
9:43 CeeJay Barnaby: Did the intuition-based guidance from the trees stack up against what actually happened later on?
9:49 CeeJay Barnaby: Did you see things and go, I’ll listen to that, but I won’t obviously fully listen to it.
9:54 CeeJay Barnaby: And then things played out and you’re like, oh my God, that was right.
9:57 CeeJay Barnaby: Yeah.
9:58 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, I would say within after the first season, that stuff started happening that next season, I actually was using a tactful like, but I was using that intuition.
10:07 Thomas Wurm: And you’ll hear a lot of guys out in the field fight fire with your gut, right?
10:11 Thomas Wurm: 100%.
10:12 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, 100%.
10:13 Thomas Wurm: So I think there was a training that was happening for me, there was an initiation, there was a training of like field testing.
10:19 Thomas Wurm: And I would say there was multiple times where it’s like, okay, our orders were to go down this road and up this canyon and start fighting fire.
10:26 Thomas Wurm: And I’d be like, no way.
10:27 Thomas Wurm: The fire’s telling me don’t.
10:29 Thomas Wurm: And that whole canyon would be gone by like 2 p.m. And that started happening a lot.
10:33 Thomas Wurm: The intuition was really spot on out in the field.
10:37 Thomas Wurm: I’m not a crazy person.
10:38 Thomas Wurm: Something is happening here.
10:39 CeeJay Barnaby: What made you realize that this was not just grief that was happening for you at the time, but something much deeper breaking open?
10:47 Thomas Wurm: After my out-of-body experience, I was really a mess.
10:51 Thomas Wurm: I had such weird symptoms.
10:53 Thomas Wurm: I knew I couldn’t go to a doctor, a medical doctor or a psychiatrist because I felt like they’re just not going to understand what’s happening to me.
11:00 Thomas Wurm: And so I found an acupuncturist.
11:02 Thomas Wurm: I found somebody that had some shamanic training and could really work with the energy system in my body because I think that was a big part of it.
11:10 Thomas Wurm: Of course, all the trauma from fire, all those things.
11:12 Thomas Wurm: But it was like the acupuncture and the shamanic work that I did with that practitioner.
11:19 Thomas Wurm: We worked together for about a year, pretty consistently, once or twice a week.
11:22 Thomas Wurm: And that’s when all my symptoms started going down.
11:25 Thomas Wurm: And that’s when I would say he really opened me up to the first time we did something like hypnosis.
11:30 Thomas Wurm: Like it was just a guided meditation.
11:32 Thomas Wurm: And I found myself in these totally different realms.
11:35 Thomas Wurm: And like when I woke up from the meditation, I was like, what did you do to me?
11:40 Thomas Wurm: What happened?
11:41 Thomas Wurm: Because remember, I’m this firefighter guy.
11:43 CeeJay Barnaby: Like, I don’t know anything about this stuff.
11:45 Thomas Wurm: Different world.
11:46 Thomas Wurm: So it was all new.
11:47 Thomas Wurm: It was all new.
11:48 Thomas Wurm: And so that really broke me open to like, there’s something beyond the physical.
11:54 Thomas Wurm: Absolutely.
11:55 Thomas Wurm: I think I knew that at a deep level, but it was like really being shown.
11:59 Thomas Wurm: And that’s, I think it’s when I started really getting shown that.
12:02 CeeJay Barnaby: As a part of your experience, you had a bit of mania and anxiety that hit so hard that you thought you might die.
12:07 CeeJay Barnaby: Now, what was happening to your mind and body at that time?
12:11 Thomas Wurm: I would say my crux for any climbers out there, I think the crux was really like mindless health anxiety because the person I lost in fire had a massive heart attack at age 40.
12:22 Thomas Wurm: So there’s this just massive health anxiety for me.
12:26 Thomas Wurm: And so it really was like a twinge in the foot.
12:29 Thomas Wurm: You know, we all get those feelings in our body, right?
12:31 Thomas Wurm: It was like a twinge in the foot would just completely spin me out.
12:34 Thomas Wurm: I would just have a, not necessarily a panic attack, but I would just have
12:38 Thomas Wurm: I think I’m dying.
12:39 Thomas Wurm: Oh, that’s it.
12:40 Thomas Wurm: Like I have cancer.
12:41 Thomas Wurm: All of those stories in my mind where it was, it was debilitating almost.
12:46 Thomas Wurm: I mean, I could work in those kinds of things, but it would keep me up at night.
12:50 Thomas Wurm: And so the health anxiety really was the hardest thing for me on top of
12:55 Thomas Wurm: You know, my body just got electrocuted from this like Kundalini experience.
12:59 Thomas Wurm: So my eyes were dilated for like three months.
13:01 Thomas Wurm: Like I probably got a brain.
13:03 Thomas Wurm: I probably had some sort of brain issue going on from so much electricity.
13:08 CeeJay Barnaby: Yeah.
13:09 Thomas Wurm: So there is just so many weird things in my body happening at this time that the acupuncture helped immediately.
13:16 Thomas Wurm: But the thing is, is that it was just all these weird feelings.
13:19 Thomas Wurm: And part of having so much physical trauma, right, because being in fire, you’re just, man, you just, you have close calls all the time, right?
13:27 Thomas Wurm: Trees, car accidents, all the things.
13:30 Thomas Wurm: So the sensations in the body became very scary.
13:34 Thomas Wurm: When in reality, what those were, were emotions that were being like stuck emotions that were
13:41 Thomas Wurm: I wasn’t dealing with, but they were going into the physical body.
13:44 Thomas Wurm: And that’s where I think the mind and body really start, especially from a trauma perspective, the mind and body really start getting dysregulated because we’re not feeling our emotions because they’re too scary.
13:55 Thomas Wurm: So then we put them in the body and it starts creating problems.
13:59 CeeJay Barnaby: When you had that first acupuncture experience, how did you know that something real had shifted it?
14:04 Thomas Wurm: And my body just started shaking, my body uncontrolled, not like a seizure or anything like that, but it was like my body was shaking.
14:10 Thomas Wurm: And from this health anxiety perspective, it would have been like the end of the world to be like, oh, you have this thing.
14:17 Thomas Wurm: But when he came back in and saw like I was shaking, he’s like, oh, that’s just wind leaving your body.
14:22 Thomas Wurm: So we’ve taken all the medical stuff out of it and we’re like, oh, this is like, from a Chinese medicine perspective, that’s, you’re releasing trauma, right?
14:29 Thomas Wurm: So I could feel there was a physiological shift in that first acupuncture experience for me.
14:35 Thomas Wurm: And I think that was, that was, that was like a big, like,
14:40 Thomas Wurm: I have some hope right now kind of feeling, right?
14:42 Thomas Wurm: That’s like, I think something’s going to change now.
14:44 Thomas Wurm: And I would say it looked kind of fast forwarding a little bit to like mental emotional release technique and some of the hypnosis stuff that I do now.
14:52 Thomas Wurm: The first time I released fear, I really did have such a physiological change on my breathing.
15:01 Thomas Wurm: It felt like I could breathe for the first time in a long time.
15:03 Thomas Wurm: And why I say that is because in fire, you really learn how to hold your breath because you have to dodge the smoke.
15:10 Thomas Wurm: And it’s like you really learn how to manage your breath probably not the best way.
15:14 Thomas Wurm: And so a lot of us would get stuck holding our breath.
15:17 Thomas Wurm: Not like people get stressed out and they hold their breath naturally.
15:19 Thomas Wurm: This is probably a little bit more extreme.
15:21 Thomas Wurm: So I can really feel…
15:23 Thomas Wurm: a shift in my chest even, in my breath, just from releasing something in the mind.
15:28 CeeJay Barnaby: So how then did you first come across NLP, mental and emotional release, Huna and Qigong?
15:36 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
15:37 Thomas Wurm: The NLP, again, the acupuncturist was like, you’re doing really good in acupuncture, but there’s this thing called NLP.
15:43 Thomas Wurm: I think you should go check it out.
15:44 Thomas Wurm: Go to one of their seminars.
15:47 Thomas Wurm: And so I did.
15:48 Thomas Wurm: I did.
15:49 Thomas Wurm: And I would say it was so, the four-day training was so life-changing.
15:53 Thomas Wurm: I immediately went to the, signed up for the two-week kind of full, it’s a very intensive, it’s like 12-hour days for two weeks on just
16:02 Thomas Wurm: you’re practicing three or four hours, five hours on each other all day long.
16:06 Thomas Wurm: So the NLP really was life-changing for me.
16:09 Thomas Wurm: And then when I started practicing with people, when I started, because a lot of firefighters started coming to me, like I have this thing that like you talked about, like, do you want to, I want to try it.
16:19 Thomas Wurm: I want to work with you.
16:20 Thomas Wurm: Okay.
16:21 Thomas Wurm: So I started doing a lot of work with firefighters and about 10 clients in, there was so many things happening energetically that I just like,
16:30 Thomas Wurm: somebody’s past life thing would come up or some sort of ancestor would come in or there’s just so much energy happening that wasn’t quite understanding.
16:39 Thomas Wurm: And that’s when one of my teachers was like, you need to go to Huna.
16:41 Thomas Wurm: You need to go to Huna to understand the deeper energy that’s happening and really connect with the elements and
16:48 Thomas Wurm: That’s where I would say a lot of the gifts and energy work really came in.
16:53 Thomas Wurm: And it’s so funny because Huna is, that’s kind of like means secret.
16:57 Thomas Wurm: The real name is like Ho’omana, which is to make energy, but it’s also like Qigong is like energy work, right?
17:04 Thomas Wurm: So it’s, they’re so similar.
17:06 Thomas Wurm: So the Qigong is such a beautiful Chinese medicine perspective where the Huna is more of this Hawaiian energy aspect that I use in my practice.
17:15 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
17:16 CeeJay Barnaby: So what changed for you in those tools that you learned were used together in specific sequences?
17:23 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, the kahuna, I think the most beautiful thing is the lineage where it comes from.
17:29 Thomas Wurm: You could be a kahuna of canoe building or agriculture or specific herbal remedies or massage, these kinds of things.
17:37 Thomas Wurm: This lineage comes from…
17:39 Thomas Wurm: kahunas of like psychology and faith healing.
17:43 Thomas Wurm: And so we have a technique specifically called higher self therapy or hoʻokuʻu.
17:48 Thomas Wurm: So that process along with the NLP is such a game changer for releasing emotions at an energetic level.
17:56 Thomas Wurm: So I think that’s the big difference.
17:58 Thomas Wurm: NLP is going to be more of a mental perspective and huna is going to be more at the spiritual aspect or energetic body.
18:04 Thomas Wurm: So we’re releasing things with energy and
18:07 Thomas Wurm: But it’s kind of cascading down to the mental, emotional, physical, where the NLP is.
18:12 Thomas Wurm: NLP is fantastic for things like stuffed pictures, for I think I said like stuffed pictures and movies and the way you’re running patterns, habits that you have, those kinds of things where the Huna is really going to help you release things that are ancestral or past life or during birth or curses or entities.
18:31 Thomas Wurm: I mean, it gets weird.
18:33 Thomas Wurm: It’s Harry Potter, some level.
18:35 Thomas Wurm: So, and so that really helped me, one, open up my gifts, but also really see people and see the root cause.
18:44 Thomas Wurm: I think that’s a huge gift that I have is being able to see their energy and see like, well, there’s this thing in your body or your mind, but it’s actually deeper.
18:53 Thomas Wurm: It’s probably something that’s ancestral, generational, or there’s this past life thing.
18:57 Thomas Wurm: And the Qigong is so beautiful where it really is just from a Chinese medicine perspective,
19:04 Thomas Wurm: There’s meridians in the body.
19:06 Thomas Wurm: They’re kind of like chakras, but then there’s like these rivers of energy that are coming from each organ, basically.
19:11 Thomas Wurm: So really the idea of Qigong is that we want to widen those meridians so your body literally at a physical level can hold more energy.
19:20 Thomas Wurm: So that’s where it’s just building the physiology to hold more energy from a practitioner perspective.
19:25 Thomas Wurm: But also as I teach classes, it’s so beautiful for mindfulness, for clearing emotions out of the body.
19:32 Thomas Wurm: It’s that…
19:34 Thomas Wurm: I think all the other tools I use are beautiful for spiritual, mental, emotional, and the Qigong really hits that physical somatic piece.
19:42 CeeJay Barnaby: What was it about your first breakthrough session that opened your heart in a way nothing else had?
19:49 Thomas Wurm: I look back at when I released anger for the first time, it was actually in the womb.
19:54 Thomas Wurm: I was, I could feel my mother so angry with my father for smoking around her when she was pregnant.
20:00 Thomas Wurm: And I imprinted that anger as being in the womb.
20:03 Thomas Wurm: So that would be an example of like a really deep level root cause of anger.
20:07 Thomas Wurm: When I released those things, it just, it opened and let go.
20:12 Thomas Wurm: But also I got to bring in things into wholeness in my heart.
20:16 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
20:16 Thomas Wurm: Really beautiful.
20:17 CeeJay Barnaby: Nice.
20:19 CeeJay Barnaby: How would you describe the difference between surviving your life and actually being able to breathe again?
20:24 Thomas Wurm: Wow, I love that question.
20:27 Thomas Wurm: I think surviving, yeah.
20:29 Thomas Wurm: To me, it’s like surviving versus thriving, right?
20:32 Thomas Wurm: And I think there’s oftentimes we get confused on what that is.
20:36 Thomas Wurm: And are you burning out or are you shining your light?
20:39 Thomas Wurm: That’s the best way I can describe it is if we’re surviving, there’s no time for you.
20:44 Thomas Wurm: There’s no time to stop and rest and listen to yourself.
20:49 Thomas Wurm: your higher purpose in life, listen to your dreams, your intuitions, listen to your emotions, listen to what your physical body needs.
20:57 Thomas Wurm: There’s not enough time for that because you’re so focused on surviving, where I think thriving, we completely flip everything backwards.
21:04 Thomas Wurm: And even from a Western perspective, we got to have the house and the partner and all these things to be happy.
21:10 Thomas Wurm: We need to flip that upside down and be calm and be first.
21:13 Thomas Wurm: to do the things we love to gain or have the things that we want.
21:18 Thomas Wurm: I think flipping that perspective and allowing you to thrive and from a place of being instead of a place of doing is like the best way I can answer your questions.
21:27 Thomas Wurm: I think it really comes down to who do you want to be and who are you being?
21:31 Thomas Wurm: And if there’s a gap in that, then let’s work on the being aspect before you start doing too much in the wrong direction.
21:39 CeeJay Barnaby: Yeah, like stepping away from conditioned responses to actually authentic being and living.
21:44 CeeJay Barnaby: Yeah.
21:46 CeeJay Barnaby: Why do you think talk therapy can build insight but sometimes still miss the root cause?
21:52 Thomas Wurm: I think talk therapy is fantastic at identifying a lot of issues and bringing things to the surface, which is so beautiful.
22:01 Thomas Wurm: Like, okay, now you have awareness of the pattern.
22:04 Thomas Wurm: So it’s possible to make some change there.
22:08 Thomas Wurm: But I think at a certain level, what I hear from a lot of people and a lot of clients I’ve had is that they walk out of those sessions feeling worse because, yeah, all of your baggage just got dug up, which is great.
22:19 Thomas Wurm: But there’s nothing to release it.
22:22 Thomas Wurm: And I think that’s the thing missing.
22:23 Thomas Wurm: I think of talk therapy, you talk for 45 minutes and then you did like a 20 minute release of something at the unconscious level.
22:31 Thomas Wurm: it’d be a totally different, it’d be a game changer.
22:33 Thomas Wurm: And that’s a lot of what my colleagues do.
22:35 Thomas Wurm: They’re psychiatrists or therapists or medical doctors that are doing that model where, so the traditional therapy route, I think is very, very useful for the conscious mind.
22:46 Thomas Wurm: And actually, I think sometimes there’s a conscious mind issue.
22:49 Thomas Wurm: In other words, it’s more of an ego or like, I think I’m right, or I have to believe it this way.
22:56 Thomas Wurm: where the work that I do is really more for the unconscious mind.
22:59 Thomas Wurm: And so it really is about letting the conscious or our ego or who we think we are get out of the way so we can undo or unprogram some of the deeper things that were imprinted with us as children, ancestral epigenetic level.
23:12 Thomas Wurm: And so I do think there’s some people that just need to go to therapy because it’s a conscious mind issue versus…
23:21 Thomas Wurm: an unconscious mind and plant medicines can be a very powerful way especially like traumatic brain injuries and you’ll see the veterans are talking about that so much now so traumatic brain injuries where maybe they can’t even connect their conscious and unconscious minds that that’s the first issue so sometimes it’s like yeah talk therapy and psychedelics those can go together really well sometimes what do people often keep working on for years that is actually just a symptom
23:49 Thomas Wurm: you and okay you got everything scanned there’s nothing wrong with you right there’s no like physical damage that you can see from the scans like then that tells me like 99.9% chance it’s in your mind that it’s psychosomatic not in a bad way we all have that it’s just
24:05 Thomas Wurm: It’s coming from the mind or trapped emotions.
24:08 Thomas Wurm: And so I see a lot of people kind of chasing the Western perspective of like, I’m going to try this drug, I’m going to try this thing or try that thing.
24:16 Thomas Wurm: And it’s really just treating symptoms and they’re just creating more symptoms from the Western perspective.
24:20 Thomas Wurm: Right.
24:24 Thomas Wurm: People want to treat the addiction, but there’s actually a much deeper level.
24:28 Thomas Wurm: You’ll hear the Western perspective talk about like, we don’t really know why, say five people can be in an accident, but one will develop PTSD.
24:36 Thomas Wurm: At a certain level, there’s something that was triggered in that event that actually ties back to something way deeper in the childhood.
24:42 Thomas Wurm: And so there’s like childhood trauma that got triggered.
24:45 Thomas Wurm: On top of this new trauma and it’s just really connected now, it’s just a bigger gestalt of trauma.
24:50 Thomas Wurm: I think that is actually the biggest game changer that I’ve seen for people is really getting to that childhood imprint thing.
24:58 Thomas Wurm: That’s the actual problem.
25:00 CeeJay Barnaby: Are you listening for beneath the obvious presenting story?
25:04 Thomas Wurm: I’m going to hold space for that.
25:06 Thomas Wurm: But as a practitioner, really what I’m looking for is I’m looking for the context, structure and process of the problem.
25:12 Thomas Wurm: And what I mean by that is that I want to understand steps like, okay, my anxiety starts with this step one.
25:18 Thomas Wurm: Maybe it’s like they get true, they see something and they get triggered, right?
25:22 Thomas Wurm: And then that feeling they’re like, not an emotion, but a feeling in their body creates a thinking.
25:28 Thomas Wurm: And then that thinking creates this emotion and it starts to kind of
25:32 Thomas Wurm: maybe spin on itself so now it’s creating more sensations in the body right so that’s just a general example but what i’m really looking for is step one step two step three step four to your process of the problem and why that is is because once we get the strategy of how you how you do your problem just like brushing your teeth or putting on your pants like there’s a certain way you do it let’s get the strategy to how you do anxiety
25:57 Thomas Wurm: Because now from an LP perspective, I can take those steps and scramble them so you can’t even do it.
26:02 Thomas Wurm: And that is where I see people really have big changes is when we actually undo the strategy so they don’t even, they can’t even remember how to do it and help switch pictures in their mind, which is really, really, I think if you’ve ever seen a horror movie or like,
26:18 Thomas Wurm: had pictures stuck in your head.
26:20 Thomas Wurm: People with trauma know exactly what I’m talking about, but we can actually take those pictures and swish them.
26:24 Thomas Wurm: And so when you think of that person or event, you have a positive picture instead of a negative one.
26:29 Thomas Wurm: Pictures are so much bigger than we realize.
26:31 Thomas Wurm: Our brain is taking that picture in our mind and decoding it into biochemistry and all of our biology markers and all those things.
26:41 Thomas Wurm: So that picture is worth a million biomarkers is what I say.
26:45 CeeJay Barnaby: And so when we switch those pictures, we have a huge change in the mind and body.
26:49 CeeJay Barnaby: As a part of that pattern interrupt, it causes the system to have an opportunity to look at it from a different way.
26:57 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, yeah.
26:58 Thomas Wurm: And I think from a higher level, there’s this idea of, I don’t know if I get this word right, but it’s really like we want to put things in a box and think about things in a box.
27:06 Thomas Wurm: But the NLP perspective is let’s actually just remove the box and think outside the box and push the boundaries out.
27:13 CeeJay Barnaby: Yeah.
27:15 Thomas Wurm: I did take some neuroscience classes recently and really understanding how much NLP from a neurological level is actually breaking down these neurological pathways is so interesting too.
27:27 Thomas Wurm: There’s a documentary called Mind Hackers.
27:30 Thomas Wurm: So if anybody wants to watch that, it is mind blowing.
27:32 Thomas Wurm: But what they show you is how anchors actually do create these, like we learned that in NLP, like anchors are so important.
27:38 Thomas Wurm: It’s a huge part of NLP.
27:39 Thomas Wurm: But to watch the brain scans and the neurological connections disconnect and connect in new ways, that’s what we’re doing.
27:46 Thomas Wurm: We are changing neurology at a very deep level.
27:49 Thomas Wurm: And it’s all about learning.
27:51 Thomas Wurm: It’s all about learning a new way of being, a new way of doing, a new way of having your life.
27:55 Thomas Wurm: People do a breakthrough session like you’re in this…
27:59 Thomas Wurm: Just like a psychedelic perspective, you have about 21 days of like your brain is recalibrating and pruning neurons.
28:06 Thomas Wurm: So you want to load it up.
28:07 Thomas Wurm: You want to be reading.
28:08 Thomas Wurm: You want to listen to podcasts.
28:09 Thomas Wurm: You want to do everything you can to create new neural pathways.
28:13 CeeJay Barnaby: What would you say to someone that’s so skeptic because they’ve tried therapy, EMDR and other approaches and they still feel stuck?
28:20 Thomas Wurm: Some people have this thing called a secondary gain.
28:23 Thomas Wurm: And I think it’s, yeah, right.
28:25 Thomas Wurm: So there’s this, the problem’s actually giving you something.
28:28 Thomas Wurm: And you agree to that problem giving you this.
28:31 Thomas Wurm: And it’s not a bad thing.
28:32 Thomas Wurm: It’s that that problem was created for a reason to, usually for protection or safety at a very young age.
28:39 Thomas Wurm: A lot of times this is actually a conscious mind issue because the person doesn’t want to believe a different way.
28:45 Thomas Wurm: They don’t actually don’t want to change.
28:47 Thomas Wurm: And so as a practitioner, we can’t help you if you don’t want to change.
28:51 Thomas Wurm: Sometimes those people need a lot of help with reframing and talk therapy is a fantastic for those kind of people that like have a really hardcore resistance.
29:02 Thomas Wurm: And I think for the skeptics, I would say, look at Michael Jordan.
29:07 Thomas Wurm: Michael Jordan’s one of the best basketball players of all time.
29:10 Thomas Wurm: And his secret was NLP and hypnosis.
29:13 Thomas Wurm: You look at somebody like, not to get political at all, but like Barack Obama, like he was an amazing speaker.
29:20 Thomas Wurm: I mean, he would just, I don’t care who you are.
29:22 Thomas Wurm: You just listen to him like, wow, oh my God, like I’m just glued to the TV.
29:25 Thomas Wurm: It was all NLP.
29:27 Thomas Wurm: right?
29:28 Thomas Wurm: So there’s these people like you’ll see NLP in so many different ways, like Tony Robbins, my teacher’s dad taught Tony Robbins, like that’s all Tony’s doing is NLP.
29:38 Thomas Wurm: So I think the next one that I’ll say is actually, I know the US military used NLP for training snipers.
29:46 Thomas Wurm: And so they took
29:48 Thomas Wurm: kind of the sniper school and they ran it through some NLP processes and said, okay, let’s try and do it instead of like three to six months, let’s do six weeks.
29:56 Thomas Wurm: And so what they did, they gave the guys strategies of how to shoot, when to do it, how to breathe, a perfect strategy of how to be a sniper.
30:03 Thomas Wurm: And they did, they actually took the six month training down to six weeks and they were shooting better.
30:08 Thomas Wurm: Right.
30:09 Thomas Wurm: And so that is, I think that’s Project Jedi, if you want to look that up for folks.
30:14 Thomas Wurm: So it’s just a very different way of thinking about how the mind works.
30:19 CeeJay Barnaby: But listeners, can you outline your eight hour breakthrough session?
30:22 CeeJay Barnaby: What actually happens during one of those?
30:24 Thomas Wurm: So the first three to four hours, two to four hours is really called a detailed personal history.
30:30 Thomas Wurm: So at that time, it really, it could feel like talk therapy in a way, but we’re not doing that.
30:35 Thomas Wurm: What we’re doing is we’re really looking again for that context structure process of their problem.
30:41 Thomas Wurm: And I want to zoom out a little bit.
30:43 Thomas Wurm: It’s not just like one problem.
30:44 Thomas Wurm: It’s all the problems in their area of life.
30:46 Thomas Wurm: Let’s say they’re working on relationships.
30:48 Thomas Wurm: We’re going to talk about every single problem that’s going on in the relationship.
30:52 Thomas Wurm: And what I’m doing is I’m looking for patterns.
30:54 Thomas Wurm: I want to see where does this belief show up, like in why and who and with this person and kind of looking at all of these other patterns until we come to this single belief that connects to everything.
31:06 Thomas Wurm: And what I would call as the greater problem, which is like the root cause.
31:10 Thomas Wurm: So we spend two to four hours just talking, just getting to that like,
31:17 Thomas Wurm: And I think it’s the harder part because it’s digging up baggage.
31:21 Thomas Wurm: It is intentionally getting you to connect all of the neurology to all of your problem.
31:26 Thomas Wurm: And so it kind of, people get uncomfortable, like their body, everything is just getting tighter.
31:31 Thomas Wurm: And it’s like, we’re connecting all of that.
31:33 Thomas Wurm: So the next stage is really doing a lot of release work.
31:36 Thomas Wurm: We’re going to use mental, emotional release and hypnosis aspects.
31:40 Thomas Wurm: We’re going to do HUNA.
31:41 Thomas Wurm: So we’re going to release anger, sadness, fear, hurt, guilt.
31:46 Thomas Wurm: Any negative, any other negative emotions you have, anxiety, limiting beliefs.
31:52 Thomas Wurm: I may go through 10 to 15 limiting beliefs.
31:55 Thomas Wurm: We’re going to go through, I always bring people through like a forgiveness process, hoʻoponopono, from a huna perspective.
32:01 Thomas Wurm: So we spend the next two to three hours just in trance, really, and doing deep, deep transformational work.
32:09 Thomas Wurm: And then the last hour, we kind of talk about what’s next on homework.
32:13 Thomas Wurm: And with these, generally, we do a lot of future pacing and install kind of what they want to do, what’s coming up next.
32:20 Thomas Wurm: And then I always recommend people do some integration work with me because these
32:26 Thomas Wurm: I would say equivalent to like plant medicine, right?
32:29 Thomas Wurm: You’re going to have such a big change that you need help integrating.
32:32 Thomas Wurm: And what I like to say is you’re going to take abstractions into action.
32:37 Thomas Wurm: So we’re taking a lot of these things that are mental and emotional, and we need to apply it to your physical life as soon as possible to install it even deeper.
32:44 Thomas Wurm: So that’s what I would say integration is, the boundaries, the values, how are you going to
32:49 Thomas Wurm: What’s your strategy for the doubters?
32:51 Thomas Wurm: All those things.
32:52 Thomas Wurm: So that’s more the integration work that I do with people afterwards.
32:55 Thomas Wurm: I remember this one firefighter, she came to me, she was so depressed.
32:59 Thomas Wurm: She quit her job.
33:00 Thomas Wurm: She quit firefighting.
33:01 Thomas Wurm: She was really, really down, like really at the end of her rope.
33:06 Thomas Wurm: And, uh,
33:07 Thomas Wurm: we did a breakthrough session and she started feeling so much better that she, she’s like my dream.
33:12 Thomas Wurm: My dream job was to actually repel out of helicopters, which is like going, lowering down on the ropes.
33:18 Thomas Wurm: And she did, she applied and she got it.
33:20 Thomas Wurm: And she’s been repelling for about six years now, maybe four years, four to six years now.
33:25 Thomas Wurm: I can’t remember the exact year now, but so she went from, I can’t even do this job.
33:29 Thomas Wurm: I’m so depressed too.
33:30 Thomas Wurm: Now I’m actually at this super elite level and repelling out of helicopters, which was my dream.
33:36 Thomas Wurm: Like,
33:37 Thomas Wurm: That was a huge thing.
33:38 Thomas Wurm: I was just like, wow, this is amazing.
33:41 Thomas Wurm: I’m so happy for you.
33:43 Thomas Wurm: I had another firefighter that she, again, really came to me for really deep depression after her father passed away.
33:50 Thomas Wurm: But it had been like 15, 20 years.
33:53 Thomas Wurm: And she had been on, like her goal was to really just not be depressed anymore.
34:00 Thomas Wurm: I was like, well, I don’t treat depression.
34:02 Thomas Wurm: That’s not what I do at all.
34:03 Thomas Wurm: We can work at the root cause level.
34:06 Thomas Wurm: Let’s see how it goes.
34:07 Thomas Wurm: And she turned around so much.
34:11 Thomas Wurm: And I think one of the biggest things out of her story that amazed me, she, she lived in Colorado and really her next step in life was like, I have this great job.
34:20 Thomas Wurm: I’m feeling better mentally, emotionally, but I really, I need housing so bad.
34:24 Thomas Wurm: I really need a house because house like a ski town in Colorado is just impossible with the firefighter.
34:31 Thomas Wurm: firefighter salary.
34:32 Thomas Wurm: So we did a prayer process and she actually applied like she’s next couple days.
34:37 Thomas Wurm: She’s like, Oh my God, there’s this thing.
34:38 Thomas Wurm: There’s like this lottery for this housing.
34:41 Thomas Wurm: So we did another prayer process.
34:43 Thomas Wurm: She entered the lottery and she actually got her dream house, like on a lottery, like half of the price that you normally would.
34:48 Thomas Wurm: So if you got our dream house, it was so wild.
34:51 Thomas Wurm: So there’s, I think the biggest thing is that people step into what they want in life.
34:55 Thomas Wurm: You know, they let go of those voices that like, you’re not a good enough, you’re not worthy.
35:00 Thomas Wurm: And they step into voices or pictures in their mind that’s like, you’re loved, you’re safe, everything’s going to be okay.
35:08 Thomas Wurm: And that’s when they start having these, finding their dream house, finding their dream partner, finding these things that are so beautiful in their life.
35:15 CeeJay Barnaby: Talking about the hidden pain that high stress jobs have upon people, what do you think the culture of silence costs people in those positions?
35:23 Thomas Wurm: You know, I think it’s getting better out there, but I know the fire community is, I don’t know if people really realize that the wildland fire community specifically has the second highest suicide rate.
35:35 Thomas Wurm: So I’ve definitely lost people in fire to suicide.
35:38 Thomas Wurm: It’s not quite the military, but it’s not that far off either.
35:41 Thomas Wurm: So suicide is a huge issue, huge issue in the fire service and across the board, first responders and military.
35:49 Thomas Wurm: But I think that’s the hidden cost of the silence and not reaching out and
35:53 Thomas Wurm: I see it so often, especially with fire people come to me because I work with whoever wants to show up, I’m going to work with you.
36:00 Thomas Wurm: But when the fire folks show up, they’re usually at the end of their rope.
36:03 Thomas Wurm: Like, I mean, like they’re like, they’re done with life or they’re in a really dark, dark, dark spot.
36:08 Thomas Wurm: It’s like, why did you wait this long?
36:09 Thomas Wurm: Why did you, I did the same thing.
36:11 Thomas Wurm: I did the same thing.
36:13 Thomas Wurm: So not to blame anybody, it’s just like, why are we doing that as a culture?
36:17 Thomas Wurm: Why are we doing that?
36:18 Thomas Wurm: And I think that’s shifting, but that’s the hidden cost is that people really are just so at the end of their rope.
36:26 CeeJay Barnaby: Are there any signs that tell you someone in that world is carrying way too much for too long?
36:31 Thomas Wurm: it’s going to show up in their body somehow.
36:33 Thomas Wurm: Their posture or even like physical health stuff.
36:36 Thomas Wurm: I think at a certain level, the silence, like I said in the beginning, like we’re going to take all of this stress and we’re going to put it into the body.
36:43 Thomas Wurm: We’re not going to deal with that at a spiritual, mental, emotional level.
36:46 Thomas Wurm: The body’s going to have to deal with it.
36:48 Thomas Wurm: So I think that’s another hidden cost of the stress that we’re not letting go by talking about it or opening up or having community or therapies, whatever we need.
36:59 Thomas Wurm: is it really does take that physical toll on people.
37:02 CeeJay Barnaby: What we just said of the person has actually been the strong one, but doesn’t know how to ask for help.
37:08 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, I think that’s a huge one for people that are leaders.
37:11 Thomas Wurm: They’re always on point, they’re always leading.
37:14 Thomas Wurm: And for them to actually stop and say, one, I need help, or two, to even be in a place to receive help.
37:21 Thomas Wurm: I think that’s a big one is giving help for a lot of people like this that are leaders, that have a lot of people under them.
37:27 Thomas Wurm: Giving is easy, but it’s actually stopping to receive is really hard for those types of folks.
37:34 Thomas Wurm: And I think
37:35 Thomas Wurm: Once they open up to receiving, it’s just so unbalanced.
37:39 Thomas Wurm: There’s a cycle and rhythm that’s so out of balance that really wreaks a lot of havoc on people when you don’t allow yourself to receive what you need.
37:47 CeeJay Barnaby: What role does meditation play in your daily life rituals and also in your healing process?
37:54 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, for me, Qigong is absolutely a major part of my life.
37:59 Thomas Wurm: Every morning, I’m doing Qigong, right?
38:02 Thomas Wurm: And so that’s, I may practice some days, it’s like 15 minutes, most days, it’s an hour.
38:07 Thomas Wurm: And so that’s a moving meditation.
38:09 Thomas Wurm: But part of that is like a 15 minute, I’m going to sit down for 15 minutes in silence or do some sort of Qigong process.
38:16 Thomas Wurm: So to me, I think there’s so much value in meditation because we’re
38:21 Thomas Wurm: We’re always so on the external.
38:23 Thomas Wurm: And to me, I love to start my day just going inside.
38:27 Thomas Wurm: And I do think there’s a modality called mindfulness-based stress reduction.
38:32 Thomas Wurm: So it’s more of a clinical perspective on Buddhist psychology.
38:37 Thomas Wurm: But the MBSR is what you’ll hear called that.
38:40 Thomas Wurm: This specifically helps so much with people, chronic pain, really depression, anxiety, these kinds of things, because it teaches you how to pay attention to the sensations in your body.
38:53 Thomas Wurm: And so it’s not fixing anything.
38:54 Thomas Wurm: It’s not talking.
38:55 Thomas Wurm: It’s not releasing.
38:56 Thomas Wurm: It’s just simply sitting with the sensations in your body without the stories.
39:01 Thomas Wurm: Because I would say this is a huge thing.
39:04 Thomas Wurm: I’ve gone through my own journey with chronic pain just from all the trauma I’ve been through my life.
39:08 Thomas Wurm: And so
39:09 Thomas Wurm: That chronic pain, a lot of times, if we just sit with the sensation and not tell the story and maybe even talk to the pain or just sit with it and observe it,
39:20 Thomas Wurm: it’s actually going to dissolve itself or it’s going to tell you something, a message that you need to hear.
39:25 Thomas Wurm: And so that mindfulness-based stress reduction, that style of meditation is super therapeutic.
39:30 Thomas Wurm: And I do, I’ve taken some classes to be able to teach some of that stuff.
39:35 Thomas Wurm: So I do bring some of that MBSR into the Qigong perspective.
39:39 Thomas Wurm: And so, yeah, I think the meditations are very, very important.
39:43 Thomas Wurm: And there’s so many different kinds.
39:44 Thomas Wurm: I mean, there’s like active, there’s passive, there’s the mindfulness stuff.
39:47 Thomas Wurm: So
39:48 Thomas Wurm: It just depends on where people are at and what they’re working on.
39:51 Thomas Wurm: But I feel like meditation might be one of the cornerstones.
39:55 Thomas Wurm: I would say deep breathing and meditation, those two things are probably number one.
40:00 CeeJay Barnaby: What is one thing someone can do today if they feel stuck or in shame or living in emotional heaviness?
40:09 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, I would say the biggest thing we can even do it together now is something called Hakalau from a Huna perspective.
40:16 Thomas Wurm: And so this is so simple.
40:17 Thomas Wurm: All you have to do is just look straight ahead, like find a point and just focus on that, like laser point on one point, and then also allow your peripheral vision to kind of expand.
40:28 Thomas Wurm: So you want to look at one point, but also the peripheral vision and looking at both.
40:33 Thomas Wurm: So you’re
40:34 Thomas Wurm: staring at one point, but also looking at the sides peripheral.
40:37 Thomas Wurm: And we’re just going to take four big deep breaths.
40:39 Thomas Wurm: So breathing in and then out the mouth, like a big ha sound.
40:43 Thomas Wurm: Okay.
40:44 Thomas Wurm: Big breath in and out.
40:46 Thomas Wurm: Okay.
40:46 Thomas Wurm: Big breath in and out the mouth.
40:48 Thomas Wurm: One more time.
40:49 Thomas Wurm: Okay.
40:50 Thomas Wurm: So number one, the breathing, the ha breathing, super good to just let go of emotions.
40:56 Thomas Wurm: This would be from a Chinese medicine perspective, also a Huna perspective.
41:00 Thomas Wurm: You’re clearing the heart space, the emotion.
41:02 Thomas Wurm: And then also this Hakalao, this laser point focus, but also peripheral.
41:07 Thomas Wurm: You’re kind of opening the brain up into this flow state, but you’re kind of going into this more…
41:13 Thomas Wurm: But you’re kind of going in this natural trance where you’re allowing things to just let go.
41:16 Thomas Wurm: This is super simple.
41:19 CeeJay Barnaby: Love it.
41:19 CeeJay Barnaby: There’s also, yeah, yeah.
41:21 Thomas Wurm: I would also say for people like Psyche position, I think it’s Psyche like psychology, but it’s Psyche position.
41:28 Thomas Wurm: If you Google that, you can like cross your arms and cross your legs and do some deep breathing and it really resets your whole brain system.
41:36 Thomas Wurm: It’s fantastic.
41:37 CeeJay Barnaby: So I’m going to look that up for sure.
41:39 CeeJay Barnaby: Yeah.
41:40 CeeJay Barnaby: Yeah.
41:41 CeeJay Barnaby: How can someone begin to feel safer in their own body without waiting for that perfect moment?
41:48 Thomas Wurm: I think to me, I always come back to nature and grounding.
41:52 Thomas Wurm: Like if I can get my feet on grass, if I’m feeling a little out of balance, if I can just ground and breathe,
42:01 Thomas Wurm: I’m going to come back to my center.
42:02 Thomas Wurm: And from a Qigong perspective, if we can really bring our mind, which our mind leads our energy, right?
42:09 Thomas Wurm: So if we can lead our mind down into the center of our body, like just below our belly button at the very center of gravity,
42:17 Thomas Wurm: If we can hold our energy there in our lower dantian or na’au, this is where we’re going to stay safe.
42:22 Thomas Wurm: We’re going to feel safe.
42:23 Thomas Wurm: We’re going to be grounded.
42:24 Thomas Wurm: We’re going to be in our bodies.
42:26 Thomas Wurm: So that’s a huge thing is most people have too much energy in their head, maybe too much energy in the heart.
42:32 Thomas Wurm: We need to come back down to the center of the body to be balanced.
42:36 CeeJay Barnaby: Nice.
42:37 CeeJay Barnaby: What does peace mean to you now compared to with who you were on the fire line in the past?
42:45 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, I think so interesting because when I left FIRE, it was really hard to, I think the integration part was that there was no more chaos.
42:56 Thomas Wurm: There was no more storm.
42:58 Thomas Wurm: There was no like fire.
42:59 Thomas Wurm: There was nothing to put out.
43:01 Thomas Wurm: So the actual stillness was scarier than the FIRE.
43:05 Thomas Wurm: That took a while.
43:06 Thomas Wurm: That took a long time for me to kind of break through.
43:09 Thomas Wurm: And so I think for me, I have found that the stillness is so peaceful now for me.
43:15 Thomas Wurm: And that’s really coming back to that, just coming back to my center and breathing.
43:19 Thomas Wurm: I feel like I’d be able to find that peace every day now.
43:23 Thomas Wurm: It may not be all day.
43:25 Thomas Wurm: I’m human, of course.
43:26 Thomas Wurm: But I can come back to that peace every day in some sort of practice.
43:29 Thomas Wurm: And that’s really what fuels my peace now.
43:32 CeeJay Barnaby: How is helping others change the meaning of your own suffering?
43:36 Thomas Wurm: Wow.
43:37 Thomas Wurm: I think when my friend passed away, it took a lot of years and a lot of helping other people to realize that, to find that gratitude for his passing, because now I understand to me, I think it was a soul agreement to wake me up and also to open my gifts.
43:54 Thomas Wurm: Yeah, there’s a lot of gratitude now.
43:56 Thomas Wurm: There’s a lot of gratitude for that whole situation, my whole journey of
44:00 Thomas Wurm: I don’t think I could help people the level I do without going through all the things I’ve gone through.
44:05 Thomas Wurm: Like, I mean, sometimes people hear my story like, oh my God, Thomas, how did you survive all of that?
44:09 Thomas Wurm: Like, I don’t know.
44:11 Thomas Wurm: God, I think.
44:12 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
44:13 Thomas Wurm: Yeah.
44:14 CeeJay Barnaby: What do you hope people feel after hearing your story today?
44:19 Thomas Wurm: I want them to feel hope because I can tell you if I made it, you can too.
44:24 Thomas Wurm: I’m telling you, I was really in a dark place for a lot of years.
44:27 Thomas Wurm: And so if I can make it, then you can too.
44:30 Thomas Wurm: And I just want them to have hope.
44:32 Thomas Wurm: Even if they don’t reach out to me or anything, just know that there’s the right practitioner, there’s the right modality, there’s the right thing that’s going to help you.
44:40 Thomas Wurm: It’s out there.
44:41 Thomas Wurm: You just got to look for it.
44:44 CeeJay Barnaby: Perfect.
44:44 CeeJay Barnaby: Thank you so much for coming onto the show today, Thomas.
44:47 CeeJay Barnaby: I appreciate your sharing and your understanding and your wisdom that you’ve gained over all these years and all power to you with helping so many people with the work that you do.
44:58 Thomas Wurm: Thank you so much.
44:59 Thomas Wurm: I appreciate it.
45:00 Thomas Wurm: It’s been a pleasure just to talk with you and thank you.
45:05 CeeJay Barnaby: It was a great talk with Thomas just now.
45:07 CeeJay Barnaby: And because of my training in NLP, it was good to hear the processes that he’s using and to understand that he has a really great structure around it all and how he works with people.
45:19 CeeJay Barnaby: And I really appreciated the way that he shared that and his understanding from his own experiences.
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