I did 2 years of TRE, here's what happened (Trauma Release Exercises)

Dr. Yusef shares his 2-year experience with Trauma Release Exercises (TRE), explaining its benefits for body-mind healing and trauma recovery.

Key Takeaways

TRE is effective for both physical and psychological trauma by releasing trapped tension in the body.
The mechanism involves activating the parasympathetic nervous system and natural tremoring responses.
It complements meditation by addressing bodily layers of trauma often neglected in mental-focused practices.
Regular practice leads to reduced baseline stress, improved emotional regulation, and enhanced well-being.
TRE is accessible and beneficial beyond PTSD, helping a broad spectrum of stress-related conditions.

What the video covers

Dr. Yusef, a medical doctor, discusses his transformative 2-year practice of Trauma Release Exercises (TRE).
TRE is a physical practice that complements or replaces meditation by addressing trapped tension and trauma in the body.
Trauma is broadly defined as accumulated psychological and physical 'plaque' that influences present reactions unconsciously.
TRE works by activating the parasympathetic nervous system and triggering mammalian discharge through tremoring.
The practice targets large muscle groups, especially the psoas, to release chronic contraction and nervous system alertness.
TRE can help with a wide range of issues including IBS, autoimmune conditions, social anxiety, depression, and attachment disorders.
Humans often suppress natural tremoring responses due to social conditioning, unlike animals who use it to reset after stress.
Dr. Yusef shares personal improvements such as reduced neuroticism, increased inner spaciousness, and personality transformation.
The practice involves simple exercises like wall sits and stretches to induce tremoring and release tension.
Consistency and letting go are key; progress is nonlinear but tangible over time.

Chapters

What is Trauma Release Exercises (TRE)?

TRE is a physical practice that helps release trapped tension and trauma stored in the body by activating natural tremoring mechanisms and the parasympathetic nervous system.

Can TRE help with conditions beyond PTSD?

Yes, TRE can assist with a wide range of issues including IBS, autoimmune disorders, social anxiety, depression, and attachment problems by addressing underlying nervous system dysregulation.

How often should I practice TRE for best results?

Dr. Yusef recommends practicing TRE for about 20 minutes a day consistently, emphasizing that progress is nonlinear but tangible over time.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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I've done TR for the last two years, and it's transformed my consciousness faster than 20 years of meditating. So, I'll explain what it is, my results, and my advice for you. If you don't know me, my name is Yousef. I'm a medical doctor and

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I now run Propane, our marketing agency, full-time. And I have spent years following different modalities, but a lot of it has been kind of neck up. So they pass in the meditation retreats, Sedona method, Zpoint, various kind of

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miscellaneous stuff, psychedelic work, and bits of yoga. But I always felt I was missing out on this entire dimension of the body. And TR is a physical practice that you can do instead of or alongside meditation. And the reason is

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basically that as you go about your life through time, you layer on a bunch of crap. You kind of accumulate that as psychological and physical sediment or baggage, and it's kind of like the cardiovascular atherosclerotic plaque that you build up or dental plaque that

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if it's left to accumulate, it can eventually become problematic. Michael Singer describes the human soul as like a helium balloon that as you untether yourself, you clear out dead weight and you naturally drift to higher states of joy and freedom. And so with that model,

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you are the one that put the tethers in there. Like you're the one blocking yourself. And TR is personally the most effective method that I found to clear out the pipes. So this is Christina Gumand. So she meditated for around 14

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years hardcore Vipassana style, lots of retreats, loads of volume, but she felt like she hit a wall. And then only after introducing TR within 2 years, she achieved enlightenment, awakening, liberation when that became her main practice.

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I was so dissociated from my body, and as we kind of work with the body, whether it's TR or some other modality that's kind of getting to this repressed emotion, it just becomes a natural thing to just kind of like rest in that body

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sense. It just becomes easy. It doesn't require effort or meditation. We realize like that silence that we've been seeking through meditation is actually always already been here. This is like we've got like static noise that's covering it up.

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And I would define that as a persistent state of non-dual awareness, like the cessation of suffering that all modalities eventually lead to. So seeing that it's like, okay, there's a natural limit to some of these neck-up practices, particularly if you're a knowledge

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worker or a solicitor like in Christina's case where a lot of your day-to-day is in the mind-brain space, but we kind of neglect what's going on in the body. So anyway, that final goal that's very much my goal as well. I

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think it's everybody's goal deep down, and doing this practice has had the biggest impact on my inner world compared to anything that I've done.

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It's reduced my baseline neuroticism, and it's transformed parts of my personality as well. So, I've been excited to share this with you. I actually came across TR years ago, like 2012 or something, and dismissed it thinking, "Oh, it's for

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traumatized people. It's not something that I need." And then seeing that story from Christina and seeing some of the effects that it's had on people's practice and their consciousness has got me back onto it. And so, I've basically

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given it a solid go 20 minutes a day for the last two years. And I'm really glad that I did. So, I'm going to show you kind of why it works and some recommendations as well. But let's just

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first define trauma because this was my original objection to doing the practice, 'cause this approach is not just for PTSD candidates. I think they didn't do themselves any favors by branding it Trauma Release Exercise. I would much more broadly define trauma as just

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clogged gunk, just the buildup of plaque. And it's kind of a spectrum from like lots of micro niggles all the way up to like some big heavy stuff that people are dealing with. And I believe it can help with that whole spectrum

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with a couple of caveats as well. Now what trauma in this sense does is that it prints your past reactions onto your future or onto your present without your permission. Meaning you will react in ways that you are programmed to react

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rather than having the choice in the moment to do what the adult version of you believes is best. And as you can imagine, that is an extremely energy-draining thing to have to do if you're always preparing and galvanizing

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yourself against something that happened 10 years ago. So trauma is not a malicious thing in that it served a function to try and protect you, to instruct you on how to behave when a future threat comes along. But until we

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integrate the lesson, it's going to reprint that stuff onto our day-to-day without our conscious permission, even if it doesn't serve us anymore. So with that in mind, you could take a look at the TR forums and you'll see people

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talking about it fixing like IBS, autoimmune issues, various types of trauma, social anxiety, depression, attachment disorders, like relationship issues, and like things like rashes as well. So, how is it that lying on the floor and tremoring can possibly be the

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mechanism for all of these like wide-ranging presentations? I think it's reasonable to be skeptical of that until you understand the mechanism, which is that the reason it clears up so many physical and behavioral mechanisms in one sweep is that it acts upstream from

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all of this stuff. Like it is simply a way to dial up your vagal tone, your parasympathetic nervous system, which then means that it unlocks behaviors and intelligence and capacities in your body that were latent to you and already

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existed, but you had the brakes on because you were in slightly too much sympathetic overdrive, and then that manifests in different ways depending on your wiring. So the mechanism of how TR does that, how it kind of allows you to

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unpick that wiring is basically mammalian discharge. What a sentence. So you're putting yourself into these stress positions that are designed to stress the large muscle groups in the lower body, particularly the psoas because there's a lot of sympathetic innervation in that

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muscle. It's the big hip flexor muscles that connect your lower body to your upper body, and there's a lot of protective and contractive patterns around that as I'm sure you'll experience if you try this. What happens is then chronic contraction in the body

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starting from there often, but you'll have various patterns of tightness in your own body, gets your nervous system to start being slightly in alert mode all the time. And when that becomes chronic and that becomes a cycle, your

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nervous system gets stuck in alert mode. So TR is just undoing that. It's pre-fatiguing these large muscle groups and stressing them to activate what's called central pattern generators. And these are normally responsible in the nervous system for like repetitive automatic

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movements like walking or breathing. But it also triggers the tremoring mechanism. And it's this kind of borderline voluntary involuntary area, a bit like breathing where you can turn it on and be conscious about it, but it can also sort of run in the background. When

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you're able to activate that, that is the body's way of discharging trapped tension. So it's like the body's kind of defragging system. It's not something that you need to learn. It's not a new skill. Like it is baked into your

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structure as a mammal, but it's something that we've unlearned because it's not socially acceptable. And you can see this in animals all the time.

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So, you see a bear that gets tranquilized and then it wakes up, and as it's kind of figuring out where it is, it'll shake off the tension and then run away. Or a deer, you'll often see if it

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gets spooked, it'll run and then it'll kind of shake things off. And that's how animals manage to get themselves back into equilibrium. But humans are a bit different because we're more social creatures and we have this idea of being

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prim and proper and how we p

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you'll see the kids sat with their parents and the kids are shaking. Even though it might be a hot country, they're not cold, but they're discharging the energy. But the adults are sat totally still and it's because they've overridden that mechanism. So

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with all of that in mind, when you are in these stress positions, you're recreating some form of physical stress that's going up the spinal cord and to the brain for the brain to then decide, am I under threat right now or not? And

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the brain then has basically three roots where it'll send that signal based on the context. Are you physically under threat? Are you being chased by something or are you in a room on your own lying on the floor? So the reptilian

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brain, the lyic system and the cortex will all receive this signal and they will route it to either the default mode network or to a transcortical loop which returns a like yes or no signal to the body of are you under threat or are you

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not under threat. So when you loop this back, what you're doing is essentially unlearning that chronic defense response and moving yourself back to baseline homeostasis. You do that with enough reps and what starts to happen is these functions that were previously depleted

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because your body felt like it was just under low-grade threat start to come back online. That's really cool. So that's where you start to see restoration of normal bowel function or reduced skin breakouts or the desire for social engagement for someone who was

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withdrawn or the ability to hold a boundary if your normal reaction is like fight, flight or fawn particularly. And this is all because you're feeling physically more safe and comfortable in yourself. And so then that sense starts to extend itself into your relationships

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with other people. And so it shows up differently for different people. That's why one person doing TR might find that if they were previously quite meek and quite agreeable because of their forn response, they become a bit more

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boundaried and maybe a bit more aggressive like you know within a healthy range. Whereas you might have other people who are naturally very fighty and that's their trauma response and they become a bit more placid. So that's been my experience as well. It's

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been really strange to see that such a like basic physical response can have these effects on your higher order social functions and all of that. Now my experience of this has not been like you see on social media with the guys that

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go to Bali and Peru and they're like vomiting and doing all these kind of big theatrical releases. I think that stuff is just for social media. And what happens is that creates this expectation where you see people on like Reddit

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forums saying, "Hey, I did 5 minutes of TR and nothing happened." Like, yeah, of course. Of course. Like, you do 5 minutes of anything and you're not going to see much. So, I gave it a solid 30 minutes a day for the first few months

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of doing it, and then it's kind of averaged to 20 minutes a day for the last two years. Now, week one of doing this, my recovery score on my ultraum ring went to 95% every day. So, it was

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previously like 70 to 85% and it just went like solidly up to 95 every day for the first 2 weeks. And I was just like, "Wow, okay, this is a measurable objective thing that something's going on in my body." And I definitely felt

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that as well. There was this inner feeling of spaciousness and the my mind was just a bit quieter. That trend continued for the first 10 weeks or so.

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And during that time, most of the tremors that I experienced were lower body, mostly in the like hip flexors, adductors kind of area. Then for the next 10 weeks, so weeks 10 to 20, I started to find little moments of mental

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clarity. And these were just like previous background concepts and ideas that I had had like, you know, almost sort of tip of your tongue awareness that were just like slotting into place.

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And it was happening with quite a lot of consistency where it wasn't necessarily new insights. It was this sense of life being a spiral curriculum and things just landing with a bit more clarity and the ability to like internally reference

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those things more clearly. Uh even though I'm struggling to explain that sensation, some tremors also started to echo throughout the day. So this is where the tremors would start to move from the lower body up into my abdomen, shoulders, arms, and throughout

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the day sometimes I'd get like little echoes of that and things would tremor on their own. So that was that's been my experience for the first four or 5 months of it. Also, as soon as I started, even though my recovery score

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and HRV shot up, I developed a consistent sleep disturbance for the first few months. So waking up in the night for like 2 hours at a time. And prior to that, I slept through the night no problem. So, this was interesting.

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Like, you know, I'm not going to try and pretend to know why that's happening or explaining. I can only guess there's some processing going on with that.

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Weeks 20 to 30, I started to notice more emotional ups and downs outside of sessions. So, there's just a little bit more emotionally raw. Like, I wasn't going around like screaming and crying and stuff, but there was a little bit

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more fidelity to emotional texture in my day-to-day experience. And I also found myself becoming a bit less attached to the truth of thoughts, just not taking them as seriously, which was kind of a similar experience to what I had at the

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end of my vipasa retreat. And if you're interested in that, got a video on the channel about this, too, where thoughts are just like a voice in your head.

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They're not like mattered to your center of experience quite as much. You can kind of be like, "Okay, that's just your opinion, man." So that was fun. and the tremors started to then move more predominantly into my abdomen and into

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my jaw very frequently. So that was the next phase and this is where I started to drop off with the consistency a little bit. And I I did notice that when I either didn't do it for a few days or

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I reduced the dosage, I'm generally a bit more reactive and that sense of buying into thoughts goes up again. For me, around 5 minutes a day feels like maintenance that it's kind of keeping everything stable, but nothing's really

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moving forward. Whereas 20 minutes plus, I feel a tangible progress, even though the progress takes different shapes and it's kind of nonlinear. Now, I'm not saying that those numbers would be the same for you. From working with Christina on this, she actually said

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that every person has a different ceiling and sometimes that can be vastly different. Some people it could be like 2 or 3 minutes if you're very traumatized. For others, it could be an hour. But what she did warn me about is

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that over a three or four year period of doing TR daily, it's shaped like a bathtub. So you have this initial period of loads of stuff happening. You might get the fireworks and all of that.

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You're clearing the backlog of the stuff that's like surface level and ready to clear out. After that, you're going to have a long period of not much happening and the practice is going to feel quite boring and quite stale with for me like

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occasional blips. And that's definitely been the case for the last kind of middle bathtub period. But there's still stuff happening. It's just there's no like big revelations session to session.

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And I've learned not to expect that as well. And then towards the end as you're like finally clearing out the pipes, things start to pick up once again. So I would describe myself right now as like in the middle of the bathtub. I'm sold

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on TR definitely being effective and just staying the course and doing it. And I've noticed some shifts in how I exist in my body. My relationship with other people. my relationship with like attachment and aversion has shifted as

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well and the kind of truthness of thoughts as well as seeing some of the general trends in my sleep score and HRV which broadly long-term has trended up over time and you can see over the last 18 months of data that I've got even

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though it's a quite patchy readings cuz I often forget to charge this thing it's generally gone up. Okay, so I'm going to round up my insights from the practice, show you how to get started and also some recommendations for you as well.

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Now in terms of my personal insights and the specifics like I could go through them all one by one but it's better that they come from you from actually doing the practice rather than spectating because as you know when you get one of

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these revelations or insights that something clicks in internally it makes so much more sense when it's generated from you. You could read a book about someone else's journey but it's never going to land quite as hard. But my main

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advice for your practice is don't try and make sense of every sensation that comes up. I think the mind will often try and jump in and step up beyond its rank, but really the mind can only try and like make inferences about what's

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happening in the body. And often it doesn't make sense. The body doesn't exist in the world of concepts and words that you find in the dictionary and all of that. It's this kind of expanse of of mystery that we actually like thin out

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the insights by trying to put words onto it. So thoughts will say things and they'll try and do that anyway. Like you can't stop that. the mind will just secrete thoughts all the time. But the key thing is that you don't put too much

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stock into them. You don't have to believe everyone because what they'll do is they'll tell you all about how you're not there yet. Maybe you're imagining it. Maybe you need to start doing another thing. Maybe uh it's not working

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for you and maybe oh it's worked for other people. But all this kind of stuff is just like doubts and anxiety and all that kind of thing and it's it's actually another trap. But we think that oh it's a doubt thought so it must be

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true. And this is something that um has really landed from Angelo Dulo where he talks about doubt as just another trap.

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It's another door. But it's easy to get caught up and start believing it and then stop the practice. And really what thought is doing, this was a great lesson from Josh Putnham from uh So Awake is it's just saying one thing, me

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and only me. It wants to be the star of the show. it wants to take center stage and it will do anything to distract you from unpicking that gunk from clearing out the plaque because that threatens its source of identity. So one cue that

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Josh gave me during any practice is when thoughts come up rather than listening to the content of the thought look at like what is this thought trying to get me to do? It's probably quite a good maxim for anything if you're being

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marketed at like rather than what is this person saying what is this person trying to get me to do? And then you can look at the intention with a bit more clarity. So with that in mind, the sensations that came up for me were like

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a rising sensation from the hips. And when I stopped trying to like put labels on it and explain things or whatever, I just let it move around, let it do what it does. And even if your body starts

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doing these spontaneous movements and the thoughts of also like, oh, this is silly, like what if someone saw me doing this, they'd like probably get me sectioned or whatever. It doesn't like these are all just thoughts to get you

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to stop doing the practice because part of your mind kind of knows oh this is actually like unpicking the motherboard and so it's threatened by that. The reason I'm telling you this is that it's often those moments when you can just

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get out of the way when something happens and that's been quite consistent for me. So there is the noise in your head, the thoughts, and then there's the you who chooses to subscribe to those thoughts. And rather than trying to stop

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the actual words or trying to like suppress the thoughts like often beginners try and do with meditation, they just like sit and try and grind it out. Instead, it's like just recognize that it can't tell you anything about

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consciousness and that's okay. So let it do what it does. Like consciousness came before any thought comes up because naturally a thought came out of somewhere, comes and then goes. So you can just say to yourself like you have

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no authority here Jackie Weaver and let it do what it does. You have no authority here Jackie Weaver.

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Okay. So if you've made it this far, how do you do it? So TR is a physical practice. You can do it alongside meditation or instead of it. The only thing I would say is that if you feel

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like you have big tea trauma or you've had stuff in your life that you're like, I don't know if I want to open this Pandora's box without the support and guidance of someone, then I would recommend working with a trained

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practitioner with this so that they can guide you through it and make sure that you don't overdo it and that you they can help you make sense of what's going on. And that's because the body is very intelligent and trauma and the your

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coping strategies are there for a reason to help you to function day-to-day. And so if you unload a bunch of it in one go without support and kind of a road map, it's probably going to be dangerous. I'm

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sharing what I've done here. I'm not a traumainformed practitioner. I'm not a psychiatrist. So if you have any concerns, work with a professional. This stuff carries risk. So, there's a good guided session in the description below where you can see kind of how it works,

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the timeline, what it looks like. And also, I would recommend if you're not feeling much from it, give it two or maybe five or 6 hours of total practice before you make a decision. Let the body do what it does and don't judge it by

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one session. Sometimes you have sessions where barely anything's happening and it could just be natural fluctuations like what you've got on that day, all that stuff. And other days it's like whoa this was quite a lot going on. So you

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can't predict that. You can't engineer it. Just show up and let it do what it does. Like this is quite a lot of it is a practice in letting go. Okay. So as I say I'm not an expert in TR. So I'm

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going to signpost you to the best resources so that you can get started rather than trying to recreate it myself and get things wrong. So this is a great guided session with Michael Hodgej and the uh founder of TR which is David

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Burcelli. Um, so he basically walks through goes through the initial positions. So this is the primary stress position that you can see some little tremoring happening here. It's, you know, it's it's often not something that's super dramatic looking, but

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obviously got to be guided by how you feel and what's going on in the body. So David walks through the nuances here of how you can find the kind of range where the tremor starts to happen. You can see

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here there's basically like subtle adjustments to the leg position, the hip angle, all this stuff to try and find the right spots. And then there we go.

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We've got some bigger tremors going on in there. There's also another great guided session that I will link in the description with another guy who has a lot more going on with it as well. This image is the cheat sheet for TR. So,

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there's a few uh pre-exhaust exercises. So, basically a one-legged standing calf raise to close to failure. this kind of one leg RDL type thing uh to try and pre- fatigue the hamstrings and the the quads. Then you've got uh this standing

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pancake stretch I guess as well as a wall sit where you slowly move up the wall as you fatigue more and more.

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Christina recommends a 5minute wall sit which is pretty savage to be honest. And then the final exercise is that position that this guy's doing with the hips raised to begin with up there. Cool.

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Now, when since I've been working with Christina, she's also recommended layering on three exercises on top of this with my practice. They are the Stanley Rosenberg exercises. They're all veagal maneuvers to just help this along as well. So, the three movements, and

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I'll link to this, too. The basic one is this. So, you interlace your fingers behind your head and move your eyes all the way to one side. Hold it there until you get some kind of veagal response.

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Usually, it's tearing up or a yawn. And then you do the other side. The next movement is this one, which is also supposed to help with forward head posture. Some interesting mechanisms behind each of these as well if you want

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to read into them. Um, so it's doing this across low arm angle, higher up, and then higher once again. And then the salamander exercise. So this guy walks through it. You're doing the same thing with your eyes as the basic one, but

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you're also adding in this uh lateral tilt of the spine. And that's to open up some of the capacity in the rib cage so that you can breathe more deeply and just get better ventilation which then also helps with the parasympathetic

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receptors in the lungs and for you to get more of a veagal response from the whole thing as well. So there is a whip through of the actual exercises and as I say I'm going to signpost you to these

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guys to see in more detail. Once I was in the rhythm of it, one thing that Christina recommended was find my upper limit. I'm finding that 20 30 minutes I'm tolerating pretty well. And she was like, push it up to 50, 60 minutes. See

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what happens. In her case, she said that going too high started to make her feel like overcaffeinated. And so she pulled back a bit. But finding that upper limit and then being able to pull back allows you to hit that point of progressive

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overload and kind of take bigger chunks out of the the gunk in your in your mind and body. So there is my middle of the bathtub experience of TR. very happy to answer any questions in the comments.

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I'm no expert. This is just what I've experienced so far. If you want to work with a practitioner, I'm sure there's loads of in-person ones that you can Google, but the ones that I worked with online were Tree Wise Blood and

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Christina Gumand. Both were excellent with their unique approaches, super wise and compassionate and have a a clear map of the bigger picture. So, I'll put all of those links in the description below.

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Any questions, let me

Topics:Trauma Release ExercisesTREtrauma healingbody-mind connectionparasympathetic nervous systemmammalian dischargestress reliefmeditation alternativepsoas muscleemotional release

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