Welcome Back to The Synergetic Health Newsletter! 

Thursday, April 24th, 2025. Greetings from Siem Reap, Cambodia!

It feels fitting that this story arrives now, in the 100th edition of this newsletter. What began as a physical mystery has unfolded into a journey dense with symbolism, synchronicity, and ultimately, a spiritual reckoning.

The Accidental Retreat: A Resurrection

“The battleground of trauma is both psychical and physical.” -Me

After turning 40, I found myself drawn to the idea of a 40-day retreat, a period of disconnection from the world and deep communion with myself, nature, God/source. I spoke of this desire to a spiritual mentor, imagining a deliberate withdrawal that would mark this period of life. A sacred pause. A digital detox. A space to be still and listen to what my body and spirit had to say.

Little did I know that the universe had already scheduled this retreat on my behalf.

A House Divided

For as long as I can remember, my body has existed as two distinct territories.

My right side: hypervigilant, injury-prone, perpetually braced. My left side: oddly distant, energetically muted, harder to access. This asymmetry shaped my physical reality in countless ways: a litany of right-sided injuries, repetitive hamstring strains, ankle sprains, a hip labral tear, even an appendectomy.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this disconnection, I've spent my life obsessed with understanding the body-mind relationship. For fifteen years, I worked as a personal trainer, helping others connect with their physical selves while struggling with my own internal division. I explored countless modalities—alternative healing practices, movement disciplines, somatic therapies—always seeking something that would bridge the mysterious gap between my two halves.

I was simultaneously hyper-aware of my body yet a stranger to it. Like living in a house where certain rooms remained locked. I developed extensive intellectual understanding without true integration, fluent in the language of physiology but unable to unlock those doors or speak my own body's language.

The Strange Awakening

During intentional cannabis sessions (what I call somatic rituals, practices to tune into my body’s wisdom) over the past three years, my body began speaking in ways I’d never experienced before. For me, cannabis serves as a reliable bridge from my analytical mind into embodied awareness, essentially quieting the incessant thoughts that drown out my body’s subtle signals.

Under these conditions, something extraordinary would happen: my body would move itself. Not random fidgeting, but purposeful, intelligent movements—stretches, twists, and postures I'd never consciously choose.

Over time, these autonomous movements intensified, building to a point where my body sought release through deep breaths and dry heaving. Nothing physical emerged, just this visceral unburdening, a purge followed by a lightness, not just physically but emotionally and energetically.

Then, shortly after my 40th birthday, something shifted dramatically. One evening, I felt a distinct thawing sensation begin in my left leg, as if some ancient ice was yielding after decades of freeze.

The Mysterious Rewiring

What followed defied conventional understanding. My left side began to go offline, I could no longer lift my knee or my toes, grip objects, or engage basic motor functions. Simultaneously, my right side became hypersensitive, registering intense heat at the lightest pressure and sharp sensations from every touch. Taking a shower was an adventure, feeling like I was pouring boiling water on my right side (painless but sensate) and no sensation at all on my left.

This unfolded over five long and bewildering weeks. It was like living in a house undergoing a total electrical rewire while the power was still on. Circuits sparked unpredictably, lights flickered, whole sections went dark. Strange electrical impulses began firing through my now awakening left side all day, signals from a system undergoing a radical reorganization driven by an innate wisdom.

Easter Revelation

Then came Easter Sunday. During my now-familiar somatic ritual, something crystallized with sudden, overwhelming clarity:

I'm 16. Sitting in the back right seat of my sister's car. My best friend is in the passenger seat . We just get on the highway after getting food. "Quick, turn right here!" The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. My sister turns the wheel, cutting across the lane without looking.

And there they are.

The Headlights.

Blinding white, bearing straight into my side of the car. A silent scream claws my throat— impact.

Blackness.

Nothing.

I came to moments later, the world disoriented and ringing. My body had blacked out, executed a perfect freeze response, the ultimate shutdown when fight or flight fail.

As trauma expert and author Peter Levine writes, "Trauma occurs when we are intensely frightened and are either physically restrained or perceive that we are trapped. We freeze in paralysis and/or collapse in overwhelming helplessness."

The defensive actions my body wanted to initiate— bracing, turning away, shielding, screaming, raising arms— froze mid-arc, trapping vast amounts of survival energy.

For 24 years, that energy dictated my reality: right side clenched against an impact that never ended, left side a numb ghost. As this truth hit me with the force of the original collision, my body finally reacted.

Not with thought, but with raw, primal force. Retching waves seized me, expelling swallowed fear, guilt, and unspoken blame— I told her to turn, it was my fault… no, she should have looked…

Torrents of tears followed, washing away years of stored but unprocessed emotion. And beneath it all something else surfaced. Compassion. For the frozen teenager in the back seat and for the 40-year old man finally letting him out. The terror and the guilt finally gave way, leaving behind a mix of unfamiliar feelings of self-love and compassion.

This was way more than psychological relief, it felt sacred, like reclaiming a fragmented piece of my own spirit, an act of self-resurrection.

PTSD: The Missing Diagnosis

What I have been experiencing is the resolution of 24 years of undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The condition had remained nameless throughout my adult life, but its effects have been real: a shadow government running my nervous system, dictating physical patterns, limiting emotional bandwidth, and narrowing life possibilities.

In a flash, the previously scattered puzzle pieces of my life formed a coherent image. The physical asymmetry, the perfectionism, the emotional numbing with substances, the trouble with commitment, the recurring injuries, these weren’t just random events or personal failings.

They were downstream effects of untreated trauma.

PTSD isn’t only nightmares or being startled by loud noises. It is often a full neural hijacking that gradually intensifies over time. Your nervous system forces you to relive the traumatic experience thousands of times, through subtle contractions, inexplicable fears, and protective postures.

Each reinforces the neural pathways of danger, making them increasingly resistant to change.

This revelation is my nervous system performing life-saving surgery on itself, excavating a buried trauma that had been poisoning my entire system. For most of my life I’d been operating as if driving with one foot permanently on the brake and now, finally, I could release it.

Across Time and Space

In a state of stunned clarity, I reached for my phone and called my friend who had been sitting in the passenger seat of my sister's red Jeep Cherokee on that fateful day in 2001.

"You won't believe what I just realized," I began, then shared my discovery about the crash being the source of my recent experiences.

His response left me speechless.

"That's wild," he said. "I literally just drove past that exact intersection where we crashed 15 minutes ago. I almost never drive through there."

Are you kidding me!? The odds of this timing….

"And also" he continued, "just a few days ago, I saw an old red Jeep Cherokee and pointed it out to Vic, telling her that your sister used to have that exact car."

After a quarter of a century of neither of us mentioning the crash, somehow his consciousness had been drawn to the exact location at the same exact time that my body finally revealed the trauma in its fullness. As if the universe, or the energetic field connecting us all, were conspiring across multiple dimensions.

The Divine Timing

It was only afterward that I realized something that sent an even bigger shiver through me. My healing revelation had occurred exactly 40 days after that first strange thawing sensation in my left leg.

And not just on any day, but on Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection in the Christian tradition.

Forty—the number that ripples through spiritual traditions as a period of trial, purification, and transformation:

• Forty days and nights of rain in Noah's flood

• Forty years of the Israelites wandering the desert

• Forty days of Christ's wilderness temptation

• Forty days of Lent

The retreat I had longed for had manifested! Not as a conscious withdrawal, but as an inward journey orchestrated by my body's intelligence.

The Power of Synchronicity

I cannot help but be moved by what felt to me like perfect symbolic timing. I was stunned: the revelation arrived on Easter Sunday, exactly 40 days after the first thaw, in my 40th year, while my friend happened to drive past the crash site. Coincidence, maybe, but it sure felt orchestrated.

The Wisdom in the Wounds

Only after this revelation did Peter Levine's "In an Unspoken Voice" take on new significance. His words about trauma resonated with striking clarity:

"Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness."

This captured my experience perfectly. The crash itself wasn't the trauma, it was the energy trapped within me for 24 years, with no recognition, no completion.

Levine continues:

"To be traumatized is to be stuck in a kind of frozen paralysis, a state of fear that remains like a robotic plague long after the danger has passed."

This frozen paralysis had been my reality. My right side perpetually braced, my left side absent, as though the impact were still imminent, two decades after the danger had passed.

Wilhelm Reich, whom Levine cites, provided the exact formula for healing such trauma:

"He [Reich] was adamant that a cure could only be realized when there was a powerful emotional release at the same time as the patient remembered a traumatic event."

This was precisely what had happened during my Easter revelation. A powerful emotional release simultaneously occurring with the recovered memory of the crash. My body had intuitively followed Reich's prescription, creating the exact conditions necessary for healing.

Levine continued with insights that explained my decades of asymmetry:

"Until the core physical experience of trauma—feeling scared stiff, frozen in fear, or collapsing and going numb—unwinds and transforms, one remains stuck, a captive of one's own entwined fear and helplessness."

And most powerfully:

"Trauma represents a profound compression of 'survival' energy, energy that has not been able to complete its meaningful course of action."

He writes that "While trauma is hell on earth, its resolution may be a gift from the gods."

This is the heart of the spiritual journey embedded within this story. It's the alchemical process of turning that intense, compressed survival energy, held captive for decades, into the gold of creative potential, renewed life force, and a deeper connection to others, nature, and Source.

The River Flows Again

This compressed survival energy had been stored in my tissues for 24 years, creating the very asymmetry that had defined my physical existence. But now, with the revelation and release, this energy was beginning to move again.

The neurological pulses continue, evidence of neural pathways reforming, old divisions healing. My left side is slowly waking up from its freeze, while my right side is finally able to exhale.

As Levine beautifully puts it:

"Trauma sufferers, in their healing journeys, learn to dissolve their rigid defenses. In this surrender they move from frozen fixity to gently thawing and, finally, free flow. In healing the divided self from its habitual mode of dissociation, they move from fragmentation to wholeness. In becoming embodied they return from their long exile. They come home to their bodies and know embodied life, as though for the first time."

The 100th Edition

In this, my synchronistically timed 100th newsletter, I offer this personal story as a testament to what I’ve experienced as the mysterious intelligence that guides our healing when we create space to listen. For me, the car crash wasn't random misfortune. It became the initiation point into a deeper understanding of embodiment, trauma, and integration, although I wish it didn’t have to take so long for me to figure it out!

While grounded in somatic reality and neuroscience, this story, with its archetypal echoes of 40 days, death and rebirth, is, at its core, a spiritual one to me. It's one of transformation, a testament to the possibility of transmuting trauma into kinetic fuel for whatever comes next.

So if something in your body keeps tapping you on the shoulder, maybe give it a minute. It’s probably got a story worth hearing.

✌️Out. I did my 100. This chapter’s closed… or is it?

📰 Read all past newsletters here.