Training Your Body For Peace

Train Peace is a self-care system designed to teach you how to rehabilitate the trauma that has accumulated in your body. I am very confident that the activities in this book can help you if performed correctly. Use the menu to the left to access the exercises.

We all suffer from pain, trauma, depression and anxiety to different extents. All mammals use subordination displays to show submission to more dominant animals in order to mitigate conflict. Humans use submissive displays too, often just to be friendly. Submissive displays that go on too long, cause stress, muscle tension and shallow breathing. It is difficult to stop using submissive displays because they become habitual and because others come to expect them. The activities and exercises in this book will target these hidden sources of stress and aggression. This will improve the way you feel, look, and get along with others.

Our bodies and DNA were designed to adapt to stressful environments by upregulating our stress response system. Our DNA is willing to sacrifice our physical and emotional wellbeing for survival. Everyone’s stress system has been turned up too high to different extents, and this results in chronic muscular, respiratory and cardiovascular fatigue.
Signals and postures indicating either submission, or aggression are sources of stress and trauma. There are many ways to turn the stress system down and we should start by disregarding the social hierarchy, and abandoning submissive and aggressive displays.
Dominant mammals are usually the least traumatized and the most composed. Dominant mammals are the most assertive, but the least aggressive.

Jared Edward Reser Ph.D.

Here is a quick list of some of the concepts that are targeted by the exercises on this website. The list is intended to get you thinking about them before we proceed.

1. Always breathe at least 3 seconds in and 5 seconds out. Your breath should be a tiny but continuous sip of air that never pauses and always proceeds at the same rate.

2. Monitor your breathing carefully during conversations; don’t let it become shallow.

3. Breathe through the nose as often as possible.

4. Minimize squinting, and raising your eyebrows.

5. Do not make your voice high pitched as an indication of affection or compromise.

6. Notice that before you meet someone, make a call or send a text, your face and neck will tighten up and you will start breathing shallowly.

7. Do not respond to provocation or threat with your face or with your breath.

8. Look above the horizon as much as possible.

9. After making eye contact, look at or above the eye line rather than below it.

10. Stand and sit erect.

11. The best posture for the neck is to look upwards while brining your chin to your chest.

12. Press your shoulders down and back, and flex your buttocks as often as possible.

13. Be very calm when you model social interactions in your head.

14. Minimize replaying or imagining negative social scenarios, especially confrontational or violent ones.

15. Be very calm in social situations. Retain complete composure. Make calm a priority in your life, even over appearing rude or unsophisticated.

16. Expect that the calmest version of you has what it takes to resolve any scenario.

17. Try being “dead calm,” first by yourself and then with others.

18. Think of yourself as pure of heart, slow to anger, and not easily offended.

19. Make your posture and countenance ruthless, uncompromising, and unapologetic but temper this by making your personality humble, considerate, and affectionate.