Take Healing and Thriving into Your Own Hands – An Interview With Tyler Begg

Tyler Begg is helping to lead the inclusion of applied neurology in the world of mental health and personal growth. He brings a more complete picture of how emotions and unconscious patterns are held in the body, bridging the gap between mindset and somatic release so that mind and body can work together. This approach allows Tyler’s clients to understand their own “operating system” and rewire it to get unstuck and develop healthy tools for managing stress so that the whole mind-body system functions more smoothly and efficiently. Understanding the nervous system's role allows Tyler to dose neuro-somatic tools and other therapies appropriately so that changes are sustainable without risking overwhelming or a return to old coping mechanisms.

Tyler Begg, Neuro-Somatic Intelligence Practitioner

Tell us about your journey and what brought you to Neurosomatic Intelligence?

I am Tyler Begg, a Neurosomatic intelligence-certified practitioner, healer, and creative. For our purposes, my journey started with the struggle to make joy an okay emotion to live with despite the evidence around me to the contrary. I believed it could be possible to live in regular happiness; this was not a belief I gained from the role models in my life, but rather in rebellion against the seeming refusal to prioritize it. As I have grown older, I have learned that happiness is not a byproduct of fun, partnership, or success. It is a state cultivated from within that can be just as safe or unsafe to feel in the body as anger, grief, or shame.

As I sought to make a life for myself that supported my happiness I was also called to heal the limitations and constrictions of my nervous system which perceived the expression of joy as dangerous, reinforcing limiting beliefs around belonging and pleasure. In my healing, I repeatedly witnessed the injustice of others who also did not have access to their inner resources, whether they were confidence, agency, relaxation, or the ability to simply take a deep breath. My curiosity drew me deeper into the world of mental health, self-development, spirituality, plant medicine, and the mind-body connection until it became clear that I was already on track to become a practitioner. I decided to make it my priority to find a way to help others like myself restore access to the resources they were unconsciously denying themselves out of childhood programming and trauma. I took trainings in understanding trauma, life coaching, and counseling, which broadened and expanded my understanding of why and how these dynamics become established and continue to live in the body and unconscious. Yet, I was still left with limited skills to facilitate practical change. I would talk in circles with clients dredging up emotions and memories without resolution because understanding alone is often not enough to create change.

A new certification course on nervous system regulation came to my attention Neurosomatic Intelligence; it looked incredible, like it had the tools for creating change in trauma, just like I had been looking for. I took one look at the price and duration and said, “Maybe later!” I was still working on and off as a Lighting Technician on film sets and the twelve to eighteen-hour days, as well as the union strikes left little time and money for an in-depth twelve-week training.

However, that night, I had a dream that stuck with me (not something that happens regularly). The long and short of this dream was: "You need to take this certification. Period." So I reached out to the instructors and they were willing to work with my financial limitations. That was the magic key. I have been working as a Neurosomatic Intelligence practitioner ever since and have seen some incredible breakthroughs. The nervous system’s response to chronic and/or overwhelming stress is complex and working with it directly now allows me to support people healing challenges from anxiety and dissociation to chronic pain without asking them to go back and relive traumatic moments from their past if they don’t want to.

What is your practice and how can people work with you?

I use multiple modalities in my practice but the most important gift I bring is my presence. It is crucial for me that I am listening and attuning to my client and their wisdom. No protocol, modality, or healing tool works for everyone, and I am committed to providing individualistic care and attention. All my training and neuro exercises are a flashlight so that others can see into their unconscious and re-discover their wisdom and agency. Changes, growth, and insights that come from within are far more helpful and stable than when they come from an outside source. I’m sure you have felt the innate resistance reflex when someone tells you what you should do in order to feel better! Even when you experience a breakthrough from reading a book or listening to a speaker, the words shine a light on something you already knew in your heart to be true; you just need to be reminded. To me, the act of healing is giving my gifts to others so that they can become their own expert; it is not about being the one who helps, fixes, or has the answers.

There are three common desires that I come across most often: the desire to no longer be at the mercy of symptoms like depression, anxiety, procrastination, chronic stress, reactivity, etc., the desire for increased connection to self and others, and a desire for answers like why am I experiencing this and where does it come from? While differentiating between mind and body can be a useful distinction in conversation, in practice, there is no separation, making it essential to have the tools to support the whole system and its needs. This is why I offer both neurosomatic exercises to speak directly to the nervous system, as well as Parts work and Inner Child work to address the emotional and intellectual aspects of the self. You as a human have so many naturally built-in healing mechanisms; to allow those to flourish it is often a matter of knowing the correct order of operations: What needs to stabilize first before I can safely move to the next step? I often teach neurosomatic exercises first so that the body has the safety to bring up emotions and memories to process of its own accord. Once the body is safe and the pressure of unacknowledged emotions is eased, goal-setting and life changes become possible, if not a byproduct of that work.

Part of the Neurosomatic Intelligence-informed approach is to be very mindful of a person’s appropriate “dosage” or how much new stimulus the nervous system can handle before it starts to become overwhelmed. I teach my clients how to track several body metrics to measure their body’s ideal dosage (and this dosage isn’t just for neurosomatic exercises; it can be brought into other modalities, into the workplace, or the household as well). Once you know your dosage, it’s possible to make sustainable change rather than pushing past the body’s boundaries for a big release and risking the backlash of coping mechanisms that arise afterward.

I offer my services online through Zoom so that anyone wishing to benefit can do so from their own safe space, wherever in the world that might be. All my services can be found online, and to ensure that everyone feels confident about working with me, I offer free consultations.

What is Neurosomatic Intelligence, and how does it work?

The nervous system allows you to think, feel, and experience the world. It is what connects you to your body and the world around you. There is nothing you have ever, or will ever experience that does not get interpreted through this lens in some form or another; and because the nervous system is so ubiquitous, it is a very potent place to introduce change. Neurosomatic Intelligence does just that. It is a modality that blends Applied Neurology with trauma research and evidence-based psychology practices. Applied Neurology is a non-medical, non-pathologizing approach to training the nervous system for performance and function by utilizing the brain’s natural ability to adapt and change when faced with new stimuli.

What Neurosomatic Intelligence does is it takes a look at the way the nervous system processes information and discovers what exercises will facilitate adaptations in the brain to allow changes for greater resilience, regulation, and re-wiring of old patterns. Instead of looking at the “symptoms” or outputs generated by the nervous system when it is under stress (which might look like procrastination, addictive behaviors, shut-down, brain fog, fatigue, chronic pain, anxiety, or many others) a Neurosomatic Intelligence practitioner will ask, what new sensory inputs can we give to the body so that it will create a different output that is more in line with the client’s definition of health. Changing sensory stimuli can produce positive adaptation in the nervous system that can affect growth, healing, performance, behavior change, and trauma repatterning.

If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?

I would like to change the emphasis on the need for big breakthroughs to create change. Big breakthroughs are useful if the body has the capacity to regulate back afterward and integrate the whole experience. Whether this is talk therapy, somatic therapy, or psychedelic medicines, I think that a greater acknowledgement should be given to the changes that are already within a person’s capacity to achieve. These smaller changes build up very quickly, and because they are already within the person’s capacity, they are solid and sustainable stepping stones to wherever a person is trying to go.

Big releases can risk overwhelming, physiologic reactions like inflammation, migraines, and mental health symptoms, as well as relapses into old coping mechanisms. Even when they do not result in large reactions, big breakthroughs that happen without the capacity to maintain them tend to fade after a while and come up again in the future: the “I thought I dealt with this already” effect. Not only that, but when you are repeatedly asked to go into states that overwhelm your system and produce coping mechanisms, rather than helping you to push past those blocks, what it actually does is train your system to get better at going into overwhelm and coping strategies by strengthening those neural pathways. Sustainable, self-respectful progress can sound slow in our fast-paced, overworking society, but the reality is that huge changes can happen in a matter of weeks or months when the work is steady and sustainable.

What are your goals/what would you like to achieve for the future?

My first goal is to spread the word about the potency of nervous system regulation techniques. They are short, simple, measurable, non-medical, non-pathologizing, and easily adaptive to differences from person to person, including neurodivergence. These tools not only support healing and resilience but enhance performance as well. I would like to see nervous system regulation tools become commonplace throughout not just the mental health field but also workplaces, medical care, law enforcement, and schools. They are easy to teach, the long-term effects are life-changing, and the short-term impacts can be felt instantly.

Nervous system regulation not only supports mental and emotional function but because the nervous system impacts the entire body, it affects physical function as well, helping with many of the physiological compensations that lead to disease states like autoimmune, postural, and digestive issues, and much more. This is why getting it out into the general knowledge can not only be healing but also preventative.

Restoring safety and trust in the body, being able to take deep, belly breaths, and dropping into a state of ease when you need it is truly a profound skill that is possible to learn. It is empowering and resourcing, and it puts the agency to heal and thrive back in your own hands. Nervous system tools are quick to lear,n and then they’re yours forever! Some people only need a session or two and the rest they can do for themselves, others thrive with the continued, accessible support of an attuned witness. If you feel curious or inspired about what is possible, book a free 45-minute consultation. These are designed for anyone thinking about taking a step into this work.

To learn more, visit Tyler’s webpage.

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