Pain Points with Max Shen

Dr. Douglas J. Tataryn is a psychologist and researcher whose work spans hypnosis, emotion, chronic pain, meditation, and complementary medicine. He received his Ph. D. in clinical psychology in 1991 from the University of Arizona, then spent ten years as a research professor with the University of Manitoba, before entering private practice in 2001 to focus on his Bio-Emotive Framework. In this co...

Gay Hendricks is a psychologist, somatic practitioner, and author of dozens of books including Conscious Loving and Conscious Breathing. After earning his PhD at Stanford and teaching psychology at the University of Colorado, Gay went on to develop his own approach integrating breathwork, movement, emotional awareness, and conscious relationship practice. In this conversation we talk about his ent...

Simon Cox is a scholar and practitioner whose work traces the history of the subtle body across Taoist, Tibetan, medical, alchemical, and Western esoteric traditions. He studied history at Oxford, spent six years training in a Taoist context at Wudang Mountain, and later wrote his dissertation at Rice on the genealogy of the subtle body . In this conversation, we talk about internal maps of the bo...

A couple of months ago, I gave a presentation the set point theory of chronic illness, it was an attempt to use a new language, the language of cybernetics to shift out of this mind body duality when talking about illness. The inspiration for this presentation was a paper by. Dr. Tom Pollock and Mike Levin. fter reading the paper and giving the presentation, I decided to reach out to the lead auth...

Elena Lake was a math major at MIT who later transitioned from her software engineering career into bodywork. We talk about her journey, and the role of perception in bodywork. Episode Outline — Elena Lake: From Engineering to Regenerative Touch 00:00:00 Introduction and Early Background 00:01:00 Trauma, Mental Health, and Limits of Talk Therapy 00:02:00 First Encounters with Touch and Somatic Rel...

This past weekend, inspired by a recent preprint from Thomas Pollak, Mike Levin, et al, I gave a talk on how cybernetic models (predictive processing, dynamical systems, homeostasis/allostasis) are a hugely powerful lens to understate the current epidemic of the recent rise in chronic illness. You can watch the video while looking at the slides here , or read the essay version below: Here’s the es...

We’ve known for decades about culture-bound syndromes that just seem so weird and only occur in a small subculture. Like men in South Central Asia who get the idea that they have semen loss and their semen loss is making them weak and tired... and we go ‘that’s crazy’. But how do we know that back pain isn’t our culture-bound syndrome? Today I’m talking with Dr. Howard Schubiner, who’s one of the...

If there is a sharp knife pressing into my hand, and let’s call it pain, if I resist, resist it, and hate it and want it gone, I stick the knife deeper in my hand. Try to push it away, okay. Deeper. Now if I relax my hand, okay, it’s a totally different experience. Now, this is like the ABC of dealing with pain. Not focusing on the pain, but focusing what you do against the pain. Because the gener...

In this episode of Pain Points, I’m speaking with David Chapman, a writer and thinker whose work on meaning, meta-rationality, and science has been the most important education I received outside of MIT. David was a prominent AI researcher in the late 1980s and later a startup founder, but for decades he has written deeply about philosophy, systems, and what he calls “ meta-rationality .” In this...

In this episode of Pain Points, I’m speaking with Jozef Frucek, a dear mentor of mine and a pioneer in the world of movement. He uses embodied cognition to combine ideas from Tai Chi, wrestling, and physical theater to create a wholly unique approach to movement that he calls the Fighting Monkey Practice. We recently finished a paper called Beyond Biomechanics, Fighting Monkey and the Enactive Inf...

“ We try to think about things from the perspective of the state itself. We too are a temporary metabolic pattern, and we have we have mental states and memories and goals and preferences and thoughts and so on. I think of all of these things as a continuum, [William James] said that ‘thoughts are thinkers too’, and it's a spectrum. We are also patterns, and we spawn off other patterns and there's...

Bren’s documentary is out! Watch here More on health, movement, and becoming the whole collective intelligence you are at essays.debugyourpain.com 00:00:00 Introduction — Movement Without Reductionism 00:01:00 From Stanford Biochemistry to Movement Coaching 00:03:00 Traditional Training: Isolate, Integrate, Improvise 00:06:00 Why Transfer Fails in Traditional Models 00:09:00 Ecological Dynamics in...

essays.debugyourpain.com ## Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction - The Coming Paradigm Change in Biology   00:02:00 The Biomedical Paradigm: Materialism, Reductionism, and Dualism   00:05:00 How Pain Is Usually Explained (And Why It's Wrong)   00:07:00 Problems with Materialism, Reductionism, Dualism 00:12:00 Pain Without Damage, Damage Without Pain   00:15:00 The Alternative: Biological Computati...

This is a 15-minute excerpt from a conversation I had with Chris Lakin A few quotes: Oftentimes people learn to do some self-loathing thing. And the consequence of that is you make yourself smaller either physically or you just do less things. People see you less often and see you as less of a threat. And then you get into fewer conflicts with them. And if you are optimizing for having as few conf...