 Thank you for getting up early on day two of AHS. I'm happy to have you here. Obviously, my name's Tony Federico. This talk is in touch, creating health and body. That's one of the things that I want to do with this talk is make it a little bit participative. So it's not simply going to be a passive experience for you. So hopefully, you guys are on board for that. I figured if you wanted the passive experience, you could have watched it on YouTube. But you're here in person, here at AHS. So let's get involved and get connected. So the first thing that we're going to do is actually just a little exercise. And it's going to be a very simple one, a very easy exercise. I want you to go ahead and just take one of your hands, just pick a hand. Doesn't have to be your dominant hand or whatever. So just go ahead and take your hand. And I want you to take your index finger of the opposite hand and just really press hard into the center of your palm. So I actually want you to feel something. Press hard in the center of the palm and then release it. Then we're going to kind of just like pet your palm, just like a light little stroke. Like you had like a little, like you're petting a squirrel. Like if you can imagine what that's like. Okay, so you're feeling something there. Now what I want you to do is purse your lips and just kind of blow on your hand like you're trying to cool off a bowl of soup. Now I want you to blow on your hand like you're trying to warm something up. So you're going to have to bring it a little bit closer. Cool, all right. Now I want you to actually pinch your hand and till it hurts. Like you actually get in there and like go for it. See if you can actually feel something. All right, so hopefully you did. Now I want you to close your eyes, take that hand, take the index finger of the other hand. Eyes closed, no cheating. And see if you can touch that spot that you just pinched. And see if you can touch right on that spot. And maybe you missed, so let's try it one more time. See if we can touch the spot and then open the eyes up. All right, so what you guys just did, you stimulated a whole lot of little receptors in your hand. So approximately 50 heat receptors when you breathed on your hand, eight cold receptors when you blew on it, 100 touch receptors when you petted and poked it. And then when you pinched it, those 800 pain receptors hopefully lit up to some extent. And you can see with the distribution here that we actually have a lot more pain receptors than really anything else. And that kind of signifies what our body places importance on. We actually have a lot of incentive to notice pain. So those receptors are classified in different categories. We have mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors, pain receptors, which are also referred to as no-see receptors. And the receptors that allowed you to find that spot with your eyes closed are proprioceptors. So we have this whole distribution of receptors in our skin, and that's what makes up our tactile sense. So just a little rundown of what we're gonna cover in this presentation. What is the tactile sense? We're gonna dive into that a little bit more. We're gonna talk about how we as a society are out of touch and how we can reconnect and how we can heal and actually kind of get back into connection with ourself and with others. Because we as modern humans, we sleep on cushion beds. We wear shoes and clothes. We communicate to our friends on phones rather than in person. We don't really experience the elements in the same way that our ancestors did. And we've got this 22 square feet of skin, each square inch with over 100 receptors that's there for a reason. And it's meant to be used and it's meant to be employed. So as an antidote to our modern-day touch deficit, we can reconnect with various things like massage and barefoot walking. And not only are they beneficial from a health perspective, but they're also interesting and informative and pleasurable as well. So there's some good things to be had by getting back into touch. So I'm gonna start with just a little bit of rundown of kind of who I am, just to give you a little bit of perspective. I think that I am coming to this, not as a scientist, but as a practitioner. Somebody who's kind of been in the trenches working with clients for many years. And the reason I do it wasn't because I woke up one day and I was like, I want to help people. I came into this as many people do because I had my own issues. So growing up as a kid, I lived on a lake, not this specific lake, but a lake similar, a body of water. So I was swimming in the dirt and playing and finding crawfish and tadpoles and all kinds of stuff. So I was a paleo kid, climbing trees, barefoot, running around. We only had one TV in the house. I had asked permission to watch it. Oftentimes I was told no, go outside. So I had a really rich, robust, great childhood that I wouldn't have traded for anything. But at some point along the way, I discovered this thing called Super Mario Brothers. And I really went downhill from there, I tell ya. It's a, for whatever reason, video games were my drug as a kid. And I, if you had Super Mario Brothers, I would have tried to figure out a way to be your friend so I could come over and play video games. So for many years, I actually kind of withdrew from a lot of physical activities. If my parents forced me to mow the lawn or do whatever, I did that very begrudgingly. So I wasn't just by my own accord going outside and getting active and, you know, had a couple awkward middle school years as a result. Started getting a little bit chubby, a little bit out of shape. And then obviously you get into high school and you start to think, oh, maybe I want to impress the opposite sex. So I discovered bodybuilding. And as somebody who liked video games, that was appealing because you have points which are pounds and you work towards a goal and you're actually able to kind of level up and see your progress. And so I got really into bodybuilding. Started living at Gold's Gym. Not really, but spent most of my time there. And that was great for a while, but unfortunately the bodybuilding scene and nothing against bodybuilders, but at least in the way that I interacted with it, it really wasn't a health practice. It was really about trying to create a superficial change at any cost. And that cost was health. And one of those things that you do when you're really kind of deep in this world where you have this superficial goal that you're going towards is you try to bulk up and you eat whatever foods you need to get there and you take whatever supplements you think you need to to get there. And so for me, even though I was exercising, it wasn't really a healthy practice and it was a kind of a disconnected practice. And ultimately I started getting unhealthier and unhealthier, the exercise fell away, but all the unhealthy stuff stuck around. So smoking cigarettes and polluting my body and really just having some dark times where I was very tense and very angry and didn't have a whole lot of promise I would say, didn't really have any direction, didn't really know what I was doing. And in many ways came to a rock bottom point or what I thought was rock bottom. What then happened was a close friend died in an unexpected car accident. It was something that really shook me to my core. I think it was the first time that a person of my age that I was friends with died. And so it was a stark reminder that I too am immortal and I'm not going to just live forever and I need to do something. I need to change something because I was destroyed in that moment. And finding myself utterly destroyed, I had to then work on putting the pieces back together, which for me came in the form of an idea, a thought. And this thought represents a little bit of light breaking through that darkness and breaking through those clouds. And that thought was maybe every day I can work towards building myself up rather than breaking myself down. Maybe every day I can work towards increasing the quality of my relationships rather than destroying them. So it was just an idea, it was just a notion. And that's where it started and that idea started to put it in practice and started to gain some momentum, started to gain some steam with the help of my family, with the help of friends and reaching out and accepting support and becoming vulnerable. I was able to get back on track. I signed up for classes at UF and enrolled in their fitness and wellness program. For the first time in my life, I started getting all A's, got on the Dean's list. I'm starting to get things together. Initiated a mindfulness practice. Again, I got to shout out my mom. She had been on my case to do yoga for years and years and I'd always thought it was silly and really nonsensical because it was very logical and hard and rational. But after having that moment of breaking down and then reintegrating, I realized I needed to connect with myself and that's what yoga allows for. Started getting interested in other Eastern practices such as Tai Chi and Chi Gung, which if you're not aware, they're just similar in the sense that they're mindful. Mindful movements, mindful breath, mindful of your thoughts. And when I graduated from UF, I started working as a personal trainer. I was talking just before this presentation of how this was a really formative experience for me. It was my first intense customer service job. I had to be in front of people. I had to be talking to people. I had to be engaging with people. It got me out of my bubble and forced me to learn how to interact and to make connections with strangers. So I did that for many years, worked at gyms, eventually became a gym manager and operated facilities. And along the way, I discovered this thing called the Paleo Diet. Thanks to a client of mine who introduced me to it, they actually had a neighbor who was an early CrossFit box owner. And so this client, Doug said, hey, have you ever heard of this Paleo Diet thing? I said, no, you wanna try it with me? I don't know why I said that, I just did. And Doug said, sure. So we did our own little 30 day Paleo Challenge. I'd say about seven pages into the Paleo Diet I was hooked. I felt like this really was the thing that made the most sense that I'd ever come across. And then of course, as soon as I read the Paleo Diet, I finished the rest of the trifecta or the trilogy, I guess you could say, and was really off to the races from there. So as a personal trainer, one of the things that I found is that there were all these little kind of buckets of knowledge. You have your exercise knowledge and you have your nutritional knowledge. And there wasn't really any cohesive framework that allowed me to hang all those things together and allowed me to integrate all those things. And that's what Paleo allowed me to do. And so for someone with an exercise background for somebody who had been in that field for a while, adding Paleo to that mix, everything kind of gelled and everything came together. And I started to rediscover that sense of joy and movement and climbing trees and getting dirty and all those things that I'd really experienced as a child, but maybe didn't appreciate and didn't really understand at the time. So I started to reconnect with who I was on that deeper, more primal level. Obviously boxing and all that stuff and embracing this primal nature and understanding like, hey, I'm a human, I'm an organism, I'm gonna get out and I'm gonna feel this world and I'm gonna be in it. And that led to opportunities to work for Paleo Magazine, which I did for many years, opportunities to come to events like this. And now working with Natural Force in the natural food space, getting to do this work in a different capacity. But it's kind of my full circle moment. And then with my H.S. presentations, one of the things that I always try to do and I'm gonna wrap up my story here in just a moment. One of the things that I always look at is what's present for me in my life right now that I can actually share that's actually genuine and has some sort of connection with what's going on. This is a picture from my first H.S. presentation in Atlanta when I was talking about Facebook as a neolithic agent of disease. And the reason I had the idea to do this talk is I had just got my first iPhone. And within a week, I was addicted to an iPhone and I'm like, I went from being a haughty flip phone owner like, oh, all these smartphone people, they think they're so cool and I just have my little. But as soon as I had this device in my hand, it sucked me in immediately. I was like, wow, there's something happening here that I don't understand. I need to understand it. And that's what led me to pitching this presentation and doing the talk and everything. And it is online if you look it up on YouTube, Process Foods and Process Friends is Facebook a neolithic agent of disease is the name of the talk. But anyway, that's what I'm trying to do here today. This tactile talk, this is what's present for me today because with my new job, with what I'm doing at Natural Force, I'm able to be home. I'm barefoot all day. I don't wear a shirt most days. Generally wear pants. But I'm able to go outside. I'm able to, I don't have any sort of social, there's nothing telling me what to do. And what I've found is if there's nothing to do, if I'm not getting any inputs from the outside world, what really kind of emanates from the inside? And there's this primal being that's coming out. I'm eating with my hands, I'm barefoot. I'm reverting back to this primordial state and thinking about that is what made me wanna dive down this rabbit hole a little bit and get into what's happening here with this tactile sense and how disconnected are we in our day-to-day lives that we are covered up and separate from each other. So getting into the tactile sense, what is it? Well, it's a system of receptors and we explored some of those receptors earlier. It's a system of nerves that transmit the signals from those receptors and then it's the brain that processes that information and creates what we perceive and what we experience. Of course, we're not actually experiencing reality, we're experiencing a interpretation of reality. There is something out there and we're formulating our own little VR version of it, but that's in a nutshell what this tactile sense is. It's, of course, one of the classic senses along with sight, hearing, smell, taste. One of the things that I think makes touch unique is it's the first sense to develop. If you look at bacteria and they have little celia and little hairs on them, they're sensing things and feeling things. We have hairs and little bili on our body in a way. So it's a very primordial sense and then the one thing that really is kind of different is unlike our eyes, which are in this local spot, these two holes in our head or our ears, which are on the sides of the head, touch is distributed everywhere. It's all over our body. It's actually inside of our body. That proprioception that allowed you to, with your eyes closed, identify a spot on a hand without looking at it, that's in your tendons and in your ligaments, there's receptors that are feeling and perceiving where you are in space. So touch is something that permeates to your entire body versus kind of having this localized quality, which I think is interesting. So this is kind of a basic diagram of a touch receptor, the nerve, and then ultimately the neuron with the little synapses which release neurotransmitters. And so anytime you get touched or touch something else, a little impulse travels along this pathway and that's what's ultimately creating our experience and our perception. And in the brain, across this cerebral cortex, we kind of have mapped out a representation of our body and this is what's referred to as a homunculus or a little man. So over the surface of the brain, you have these different parts of the body that are related to it. So if you were to take a device and maybe stimulate the brain in these different locations, you'd actually experience a sensation in these different body parts, which I think is pretty cool. But the brain actually doesn't even have to be involved sometimes. So in our reflex pathways, the brain is skipped using what's called, so that little B is the interneuron. And so if you touch something hot, A, you experience that pain. Well, you don't even know you've experienced that pain. The signal goes right through the interneuron and goes right into a reflex pathway where a motor neuron pulls your hand back. You don't even have to be consciously aware of this stuff. So touch is cool because, yeah, we do have our own perception of it, but there's also programs running in the background that are below our conscious attention. So there's stuff that's happening subconsciously related to touch. Here's a couple more homunculi for you. The one on the left, that's a motor homunculi and then the one on the right is a sensory. Now, this is just to show the relative, I guess you could say importance of different body parts. So from a motor perspective and from a sensory perspective, our hands on our face are really where it's happening. And again, just like in the sense that we've got all these pain receptors relative to other receptors that just shows you how important these two parts of our body are for survival, for the propagation of our species, for our ability to navigate the world and experience life and to do so in such a way that allows us to propagate and carry on. It'd be really weird if we looked like that, I'm glad that we don't. But that's how we feel. We actually kind of feel like we're ahead in a hand and then there's maybe a little bit of some other stuff hanging along. So we've got, we have situations where the brain is activated because of us actually doing something. But then we have situations where the brain is activated and we haven't even done anything. We've maybe witnessed another action. And this is something that they believe is moderated or modulated through something called a mirror neuron. So you see something happening. I don't know if you've ever had this experience. Maybe somebody who's watching a sporting event and you almost like are, you're like almost involved somehow. Like you by somehow moving your body are helping that person on screen move in their own way. And we're going back to my video game days when I was a kid, if you're the second player and if anyone played Super Mario Brothers, you'll know, you press jump when the other person's jumping. And it's like, oh, you're not doing anything but you're having this response just because of someone else's response. So I apologize if anyone's a little bit, I don't know if this bothers you. But so yeah, exactly. This is what it looks like if you tear every ligament in your knee and dislocate your kneecap at the same time. This is a guy, Marcus Lattermore. He was playing for the University of South Carolina. Unfortunately, this wasn't career ending at that time. It ultimately was. He eventually played for the 49ers and had to pull out because he could never really rehab that knee. But I have a feeling that you feel a little bit uncomfortable. You don't even feel a little bit of a desire to kind of hold your knee. And there is something to be said for us having this mirror neuron empathic experience. So why is Touch more than just us as an individual? Why is Touch something that reaches out to other people and actually feels their pain? Well, if we look at our non-human primate cousins, they spend a significant portion of their day grooming each other. Engaged in Touch. Why do they do that? Well, the thought is it promotes social cohesion. It releases oxytocin. It feels good and it helps people to bond. Well, human beings, we do that. We groom each other. We tend to do it more with words. This is what I got into during my Facebook talk. It's thought that by decoupling social grooming from Touch and picking out lice and things like that and by just talking to each other, we're able to expand the size of our groups and actually have a larger general tribe size than our primate cousins. But at the same time, we still have those same responses. We still have that same oxytocin release. We still have that same desire to bond through being in Touch and in contact with people. Some interesting stuff. Not only do we bond with Touch, but we actually communicate with Touch. It's not a one-way flow. It's not just stuff coming in and coming into us. It is a way that we actually reach back out to the world. There's a study done at DePaul University and it was called the Communication of Emotion via Touch. And what they found is that we can, with a high degree of fidelity, communicate emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy. And we can communicate those emotions as well with Touch as we can with tone of voice or with facial expressions. So a touch can say as much as a word or a look. So we've got this incredible sensory system. We have this incredible tactile system and we've got these bodies that are totally embedded and mapped with Touch receptors and they allowed us to live in the wild and to form groups and to survive and to do so for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. So we've got this wonderful wet wear perceptual system and what are we doing with it today? So this is where we're gonna talk about how we are kind of messing things up and getting out of Touch. No judgment if you text with your friends. I certainly was texting with somebody earlier today but I think it's about how much are we doing this and how much are we doing this to the detriment of other forms of communication. Well, studies show that teenagers now, 50% of their communication is happening via text and it's the preferred method of communication. So it's a little bit easier to communicate via text but what we're doing when we communicate on a text message, we're trading oxytocin, bonding hormone for dopamine and a lot of social media is actually built to try to get the maximum amount of dopamine response. Well, dopamine isn't the same thing as oxytocin and they've done studies that show that social media use is actually inversely related to feelings of connectedness. Now, you could dive into those studies and maybe find errors in them in the sense that maybe the number of people isn't enough to really draw firm conclusions but I personally can go on Facebook for an hour and kind of feel a little bit hollow and feel a little bit empty and feel a little bit unsatisfied, almost icky, like I gotta get out into the world and refresh myself afterwards. So we have this subjective experience or many of us do where, yeah, there might be moments where communicating via text or on social media is rewarding and that's where dopamine comes in but there's also a little bit of a hollowness and a little bit of a shallowness to it which we just need to acknowledge and be honest about. So another way that we're out of touch is that we're inside. I mean, what are we doing right now? I mean, we're in these kind of manufactured spaces with synthetic materials and we're not experiencing the sun. We've got fluorescent lights coming down on us. We've got temperature controlled air conditioning and heat and things of that nature. So we're not feeling the environment around us. We're not feeling the heat. We're not feeling the cold. We're not feeling the rain. We're not feeling the dryness. We're not feeling really a whole lot of anything and if anything, we're trying to create a little bubble that is very consistent from day to day to day to day and it's very deadening to our senses and it's not very stimulating. So another form of disconnection. Not only do we have technology in the way and so far as cell phones and being inside little boxes, we're just geographically more separated from each other. I live in Florida. My sister lives in California. My parents live in North Carolina. That core family unit we would have 100 years ago probably all lived in the same house or at least in the same neighborhood. So if we look at senior citizens who at one point would have been our tribal elders who would have been sources of wisdom and strength through our communities, they're in nursing homes. They're living by themselves. Loneliness and depression are epidemic and it's not just seniors. It goes all the way through the demographics to middle-aged people and young people. I was on a lift on the way over here this morning talking to a guy and he was telling me about the Seattle freeze which apparently is a phrase that means here in Seattle. I don't know if this is true, this is just what the lift driver told me. People tend to kind of keep to themselves in their social networks. They don't really expand beyond and again it's a generalization but it's interesting that that was something that came up. So in addition to those geographical barriers when we actually get outside, like let's say we actually do get outside. I'm not picking on women. I think these shoes are equally bad. We are absolutely disconnected from our feet and if you remember that little sensory homunculi even though the hands were the primary focus, the feet were probably second to the hands as far as appendages are concerned. And so we have all these sensors and all these bones and all these articulations in our foot that are immobilized and that are basically taken out of action. On our body surface, we're layered up with synthetic fabrics. So again, it's not bad enough that we're inside a building. We've got ourselves covered up. And then how is our skin interacting with the world? Well, it's not. It's interacting with fabric and that has moisture affecting elements. It could be affecting our skin microbiome and there could be toxicity involved in these synthetic fabrics for us as individuals as well as for the environment. And then we've got social barriers as well. A lot of men feel uncomfortable expressing platonic affection to other men and that's a relatively new phenomenon. That's only something that's come about in the past 100 years or so. If you look at some pictures from the turn of the century, you'll see a guy sitting on another guy's lap just like, hey, buddy, it's a nice lap. Why wouldn't you want to sit on it? You know, there's something to be said for cultures that guys can still hold hands with their friend or even kiss a friend and it's not a big deal. And why shouldn't it be a big deal? If anyone wants to hug or kiss later, just let me know. Maybe just a hug. So this is probably to me the ultimate indication of an out-of-touch society that in 21 states you can actually be potentially arrested for nursing a child. I mean, we're mammals, mammal, mammary glands, that's why we're here. So this is just another sign. It's another symptom of a society that's gotten out of touch. We've sexualized our body parts, we've commoditized our body parts and now they're not even allowed to do what they're meant to do. And obviously this is the most primordial form of connection, the most fundamental form of connection that we can possibly have. So how do we fix it? Well, we do what we do in the ancestral health community, we look to our ancestors, we try to figure out a way to implement it in our daily lives, some of these principles and if we do that we stand to benefit. Some of those benefits include orthopedic longevity, satiety, reduced pain, anti-anxiety, reduced postpartum depression, increased vitamin D status and maybe even more and I'll show you how here in a moment. First things first, lose the shoes, at least some of the time. I mean, I've got shoes on right now, I'm not trying to be hypocritical, some of you are barefoot, that's great. You're actually feeling a lot more stuff. So this is an excerpt from a study done by an AHS alumni, David Lieberman, who's spoken at this event before, found that habitually barefoot runners have less impact forces than habitually shod or shoe wearing runners. So why? Well, because you can actually feel what's going on. Anyone here who's barefoot right now, I challenge you to run across the room, not actually literally this moment, but run across the room and see how you run. You're gonna run differently if you have shoes on than if you're barefoot. And the reason is because you feel it. You actually feel what's going on. Second thing, eat with your hands. I went out to an Ethiopian restaurant last night. You're eating with your hands. It's a sensual experience, it's a tactile experience. It slows things down, it makes things more mindful. Eating with our hands, there's probably some microbiome microbial transfer that's taking place that we're gonna cut off from. Forks were only introduced to the West around 1000 AD and didn't become popular into the 17th century. So if we're looking at evolutionary mismatches, forks and spoons and certainly sporks are not, they're not paleo. These are our utensils. And of course, in cultures that do eat with their hands, there's social norms that help to prevent the spread of foodborne illness using only one hand, only using the fingertips, not licking your fingers after every bite. But at the same time, they are connected to their food in a much deeper way and that's something that we can do. Getting a massage, easy way to get back in touch, to experience touch. And one of the things that makes scientific study of massage difficult is that you really can't do a placebo massage if someone's just kind of like pretending to touch you. You're gonna know. But in studies that they have done, this is actually a Seattle study. It showed that there is a reduction in chronic low back pain lasting for six months in some participants from massage. So getting a massage, do it. And then give somebody else a massage. They looked at massage therapists and found that their subjective rating of anxiety was decreased after providing a massage. So that was a massage therapist who it's literally their job. So if somebody who's literally doing their job is getting an anti-anxiety effect, you as a husband or a wife or a spouse or partner or whatever, show a little love to your partner, give them a massage. Not one of those like quick little like one, two, and leave it alone thing, actually get in there. And you're gonna get a benefit just from doing that. And if your spouse or partner happens to be pregnant, there are studies that show that it actually helps reduce postpartum depression. Happy wife, happy life, all that stuff. Then lastly, get outside. And I think that the mountains in this case can be anywhere where you go to reconnect with the outdoors. We get 80 to 90% of our vitamin D from the sun. 15 minutes of just sun exposure is enough to help improve our vitamin D status. But beyond that, I think there's some more subtle benefits from getting outside. There's a practice in Japan called shinrin yoku or forest bathing, and they actually have people that are taught to take people into the woods and show them how do you actually experience nature? And it's not this thing where you go in and you have a goal and you're gonna get from here to there and you're gonna be done. And it's about absorbing and appreciating and being present. And we can do that really anywhere. And of course, getting outside, it's not always good in the sense that there's spider webs and there's bugs that can bite you and there's sharp things that you can step on but I think that whole spectrum of experience is part of the benefit. You have to have the good and the bad together in order to feel the world. So how do you really move the needle on some of this stuff? Well, you gotta make it a habit. And habits don't just happen by doing something once or twice and maybe you hear it at AHS and you're excited and you're pumped up and you walk around with no shoes on for a couple of days and you're gonna go out to dinner tonight and maybe you're gonna think, and maybe I'll eat with my hands. Well, you gotta do it over and over and over again. So I'm supposed to be out of time. I'm going to defy the timekeeper and show you guys a little two minute touch up and we're gonna all do this together. So stand it on up. This is part of the participation. It's early in the morning. We gotta get ourselves moving, do something. If you didn't go to Daryl's workout or you gotta get this body going. So what is this little two minute touch up gonna do? Get you in a parasympathetic relaxed receptive state. It's gonna activate your touch receptors. It's gonna give you an opportunity to build an in touch habit. So first things first, let's go ahead and just take those hands up and overhead. Just reach up, stretch up and then give it a little side to side. And we're just feeling what's happening. Feeling what's going on in your body. This lateral movement. We don't get a lot of this in our life so this is a nice opportunity to open up some of those sides through the ribs, through the sides of the spine. Good, bring it back to the center. Gonna relax those arms down. So we're gonna take the hands, palms up and I want you to rotate your thumbs back, open up across the chest, kinda look up. So we're just opening up through the chest, opening up through here, a little bit of a back bend almost. Open it up through the front body and then bringing it back to the center. So we're just feeling what's happening. And if you're doing this practice on your own, obviously you can stretch forward. Obviously you can do whatever kind of stretching helps you to reconnect with your body. It's just about getting back in touch. Next thing we're gonna do, take the hands out. We're gonna squeeze the hands, squeeze the forearm, squeeze the bicep, stricep, squeeze the chest, scrunch up your face, scrunch up your neck and then just let it go. Now let's do that one more time. I think you guys can go a little bit harder. So squeeze the hands, squeeze the forearm, squeeze the arms, chest, face, scrunch it up and let it go. All right, cool. Next up, take your right hand, place it over your belly, left hand, right over the right. We're gonna breathe in and out 10 times. So breathe in and exhale out, breathe in, breathe in out and as you inhale, feel the stomach pushing out against the hands. Exhale, that's only three. Breathe in and out. Try to get into it. Start relaxing, breathing in and out. Feel the breath coming in through the nose, in. Feel the exhalation out. We're halfway there, breathing in, deep exhalation. Exhale out fully, empty the lungs. Breathe in, full expansion, out. Two more, deep breath in, full exhale out. One more time, make this one count. Deep breath in and exhale. Good. All right, so now what we're gonna do, just go ahead and take your right hand over your left hand, hold your hands right in front of your belly, kind of get a little bit of an athletic stance, a little bend in the knees. Close your eyes if you like. Relax the shoulders, relax the face. Just try to be centrally present. So just feel what's happening. Feel what's happening in your body. Can you feel your heart beating? Can you feel your feet pressing against the floor or your shoes pressing against your feet? Feel your skin, feel the temperature of the room. Noticing any internal sensations, any external sensations. Feel your back, feel your spine, feel your shoulders, arms, legs, knees. Just try to experience what's happening right here and now. And just feel it. Good. All right, so it took two minutes. Hopefully you actually feel a little bit different than you did before we started. One of the things that I like to do to finish is take the hands, just kind of rub the hands together, get them nice and warm. And this is called a dry bath in Tai Chi. And then you're just gonna brush down the arms, kind of just brush your body, rub the hands, brush down the arms, brush the body, rub the hands, brush down the midline. That's why it's better to try to be a little bit more primal in your attire when you do this. One more time, we're gonna rub the hands together, we're gonna rub our face, just brush the face, rub the hands together, brush the neck, brush around the ears. Good, rub the hands together and give the person to the right of you a high five, left of you a high five. Good, all right, shake their hands now. We're gonna go ahead and just shake their hands, good firm handshake. All right, bring it in for a bro hug. Bro hug it out, bro hug it out. There you go, bro hug it out. You guys are great, you just went in there. Went for the full shebang bang. That's awesome. So, psychotherapist Virginia Satir said we need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance and we need 12 hugs a day for growth. So, you guys already got four hugs, hopefully, in there. So, your survival quotient is taken care of. You've got a few more to go for maintenance, a few more to go for growth. Hopefully, you're on your way. And hopefully, today, I've given you some things to talk about, some experiences to reflect upon, some strategies for infusing more touch into your life. Obviously, as a society, we've gotten out of touch, but as individuals, our tactile fate is in our hands, literally. So, I want you to have fun with it. Don't think of it as a thing that you're doing with a specific goal. It's just part of being a human. It's part of experiencing this wonderful gift that we have called life. So, basically, get outside, play, have fun, and get in touch with each other. Thank you.