Pushing Boundaries with Dr. Thomas R Verny

Daviorr Snipes started at the Stratford Festival four months ago as its first Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). Before arriving in Stratford, Daviorr served as Director of EDI at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. In his present position his focus is on devising and implementing strategies to make the theater experience more attractive to racialized communities which in the past have not felt welcomed. We spoke about the need to extend this feeling of being treated as equals at the theater to everywhere in the city of Stratford. 

Daviarr shared many memories of his upbringing in Macon, Georgia and how at the age of 16, in an English class, even though he had never seen a play, he  suddenly had this irresistible desire to act in the play they were reading, which was Macbeth, instead of simply reading it. His love, he told me, was about the joy he received from telling stories, and having a communication with the audience where he got to talk about the most difficult, personal and joyful aspects of life with complete strangers every night and hopefully have the chance to show them a different way to see the world and the people in it through these stories. 

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David quit his surgical practice in 2019 to pursue teaching patients and medical providers how to solve chronic pain without surgery or addictive drugs. He has advocated for well-documented  and effective solutions for chronic pain that need to be brought into mainstream medicine. We discuss the many different routes this can take such as journaling, emails, webinars, Q&A sessions, and instructional videos. David tells his patients never to talk about pain and to participate in his Direct Your Own Care (DOC) Journey which is intended to calm the nervous system, rewire the brain and allow your body to heal. 

David shares with me his early childhood traumas, his struggles with both, mental and physical health and his ultimate recovery. For more information  visit https://www.thedocjourney.com/

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My guest today is Olga Gouni. Olga is a researcher, Psychotherapist/ Educator and author of  Soul Days, Welcome, Once Upon a Time in Embryoland, The History of Prenatal Psychology,  co-editor and chapter contributor of Prenatal Psychology 100 years and  author of 15 papers in various journals.
Her main interest is connecting the academic world with the community designing and implementing services that promote human consciousness evolution, wellbeing and peace. Olga introduced Prenatal Psychology to Greece and taught it at the Kapodistrian University.
Olga is the prime organizer of The Prenatal Sciences Global Congress, Virtual in Oct. 2022 that will be attended by speakers and participants from 120 countries. We talked about the Congress and its very exciting program. Each day will start with an opening ceremony. There will be many art exhibits. As Olga said, “In our case More is JUST MORE.”
We also spoke about Olga’s early years and how she developed an interest in Pre and Perinatal Psychology and what matters the most to her in life.
My guest next week will be Dr. David Hanscom, prominent spine surgeon, who will speak about how to conquer debilitating chronic pain without surgery. His methods evolved from his own 15-year experience fighting chronic pain.

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My guest today is Dr. Paul Valent, psychiatrist, lecturer at Monash University, cofounder and past president of the Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and of the Child Survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne, Australia. 
In the course of his work, he tells me, he  has come to understand the close connections between mind, body, and society, and how trauma disrupts all these aspects. We discus child survivors’ stories. Their experiences that range from living in hiding to physical and sexual abuse. These stories contribute to questions concerning the roots of morality, memory, resilience, and the trans-generational transmission of trauma. 
Dr. Valent, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, believes that the Holocaust shows us  both, the greatest human vulnerabilities and strengths and everything in between. It warns and explains how people’s minds can become distorted, and how they can apply themselves to wiping out who they see as enemies, even though they are but reflections of themselves. When bureaucracy and modern weaponry are applied to this wiping out, the costs are immense. “I see ripples of the Holocaust in myself, in others, across generations, and across nations.”  Don't we all.

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I discuss with my guest, Prof. Nicolas Rouleau, Algoma University, Canada his transdisciplinary approach to understand the fundamental nature of cognitive systems.
One of his most interesting researches focuses on the structure of the post-mortem human brain. Functions of the human brain are not assumed to be preserved beyond death and subsequent chemical fixation. Prof. Rouleau and his group present a series of experiments which, together, refute this assumption. Instead, they suggest that chemical preservation of brain structure results in some retained functional capacity. Patterns similar to the living condition were elicited by chemical and electrical probes within coronal and sagittal sections of human temporal lobe structures that had been maintained in ethanol-formalin-acetic acid. So, this raises many questions: what is life, what is consciousness, when is a person dead, are we ever totally dead? We also converse about the nature of electromagnetic fields and subatomic particles like photons.

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My guest today is Scott Tate, consulting personal trainer and coach based out of Toronto and Chatham-Kent, Ontario. He is the owner of  Tate Body Sciences. Scotty
works with adults, often dealing with  movement disorders or other chronic concerns, such as Parkinsons or Multiple Sclerosis or other neurodegenerative conditions.He applies Kinesiology and Sports Science principles to develop for each of his clients a personalised body science plan. According to Scotty, as he likes to be called, “The secret sauce is our deeply human approach to your journey.”
He discusses his 4 step plan:
Step 1: Write your health story.
Step 2: Establish your baseline. 
Step 3: Build your movement practice. 
Step 4: Maintain your progress.
Working together with his wife who is a naturopath, Scottty is also very much focused on healthy nutrition as an aid to body movement.

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Scientific advances in reproductive technology now allow for infertile couples,  LGBTQ+  couples or even single people to have a child in an almost infinite variety of ways in many cases without sexual intercourse. My guest, Klaus Käppeli, MSc, a Swiss psychologist and psychotherapist specializes in treating children born by AI, IVF and other third-party conception techniques who have developed emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, persistent crying, hyper vigilance and the like. Over the last decade, Klaus  has treated more than 50 such children. He relates some of their case histories and the therapeutic interventions he has employed to help them resolve their issues. We discuss strategies that parents contemplating this route to having a child may utilize to avoid potentially traumatizing their children.

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We learn from Prof. Murugan that studies in brainless slime molds reveal that they use physical cues to decide where to grow. The physarum polycephalum i. e. slime mold, demonstrates how brainless organisms process information toward adaptive behavior. According to Prof. Murugan, a slime mold can use mechanical cues in its surrounding to reliably make decisions about distant objects and performs computations similar to what we call "thinking" to decide in which direction to grow based on that information. Scientists are becoming more interested in slime molds and similar unicellular organisms because in spite of lacking a brain or even a single neuron it can still perform many behaviors that we associate with cognition, like solving mazes, learning new things, and predicting events.

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My guest today is Dr. Matthew Regan, assistant professor of animal physiology in the Département de Sciences Biologiques at the Université de Montréal. We discuss how hibernating animals find it hard to get the nitrogen they need to maintain muscles – but ground squirrels have gut microbes that can break down urea to free up the nitrogen it contains. How knowledge gained in these experiments may, in the future, benefit people who lose muscle mass simply by the aging process or because of being  by bedridden. Similarly, it applies to astronauts who spend many months in a weightless environment. We talk about Matthew’s musical achievements and his interest in sports cars.

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My guest is Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, Occupational Therapist, Intuitive Healer, Integrative Health Practitioner, Health Coach, teacher, consultant, and author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance with Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. We talk about how to learn to trust your own intuition and how this can benefit your life.

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