Hey, everybody. Welcome to my guest tonight. I'm Jeff. I'm your host.
I've got a great guest joining me, Tessa Santarpia. We're
talking neuroscience, anxiety, trauma, CEO
visualize in 360 Playboy bunnies. She
blends breathwork and brain waves somatic and soul
A guide through the chaos to help people feel whole
with roots in the science and eyes on the light
she's helping us heal through the darkest of night
she's Tessa Santarpia bold and bright and
she's joining Jeff re villa on my guest tonight. Where
spirit meets science and stories ignite so
tune in now this moment feels right.
Tessa, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you, Jeff, for turning my life into a song. That was epic.
That's my favorite part of the show because I'm trying to, you know, set a
stage, tell a story, and give a little bit of your background in that song.
A lot of times I see people, they're backstage, they're dancing, and it is
a. It is a weird thing to hear a song about you.
And it. It kind of really sets the stage for, you know, what we're going
to talk about. We have some amazing things to cover in the next 45
minutes. And I was. I'm in Pittsburgh, I think you're. Are you in
New York? I'm in la. You're in L. A now, but
you're from the New York area. Yep, from Buffalo, New York.
Buffalo, New York. And that's where you started your education,
where all this journey began. I think you went to Fordham
University, studied biological sciences and went on for your master's.
Tell us a little bit about your studies and what led you down that
path. Yeah, so I went to
Fordham. I was kind of on the pre med track.
Biology, psychology. I was just very drawn to the sciences.
And then I ended up going on for my master's in health
policy and management at Columbia University. University.
And I was just very drawn to wanting to help people heal
themselves, drawn to health. So that was just a really exciting
time for me. Living in New York, had the support of these two
schools by me to kind of figure out my path.
Was there anything that led you into the medical field? Was
there something. Is it a. Something that happens in your family? Is it was
an experience you had maybe in high school or some sort of trigger that
pushed you down the medical path? Well, my mom
is a neuropsychologist, and I have seen the way that she
interacts with her patients and just the support that she's given
over the years. So I was very drawn to psychology, but I
didn't necessarily want to go to school to be a psychologist. I was more
into bridging kind of different areas of
science and medicine into one. So I couldn't really just focus
on one discipline that I wanted to study.
I kind of had a wandering eye to bridge a lot of different
gaps. And I realized very later in my career that that was actually my
superpower. Although it felt very chaotic
when I was going through school. Were there certain
classes that jumped out at you? Like, this was something that really
caught my attention, or I really dove in headfirst
and these types of classes? Yeah, I loved
physics, specifically quantum physics. I was very drawn
to our understanding of reality,
consciousness, the things that we couldn't necessarily see.
And I was very drawn to bridging kind of science and
measurement with those aspects of science. So it was
very. It was exciting to kind of dive into that and learn.
Like, wow, there's a lot of different people studying a lot of different areas that
are not just taught to me in school. I can actually do a lot of
insight on the Internet and go to different retreats. And it just
kind of opened my eyes to what was really available,
and. That really sets the stage for your future. And I was doing a lot
of research on you. Very difficult to find a lot on you other
than your LinkedIn page, Facebook, Instagram. There wasn't a
ton. But you revealed something that you did while you were going to school
to help get you through school. And it kind of not
defined who you were, but, you know, help you grow as a person and. And
tell us a little bit about what you did while you were going through school.
Okay. So when I moved back to New York City for graduate school,
I had heard that a Playboy club was reopening in
Manhattan. It was an effort to revamp the brand,
and Playboy had always held kind of an allure for me. My
mom was a Playboy Bunny in the 80s, and she actually
loved her experience. I always loved her stories. That's also
where she met my dad, who was working as a bartender at the time.
So in a way, Playboy is really where my story begins. And
there was just something about the brand, the history, and even the
taboo that really always intrigued me. So I was
very excited to audition and
have that as my job while I was putting myself through school. And it really
was an incredible experience. I met very cool people.
I was kind of introduced into the nightlife in New York City and learned what
the hospitality industry is like. And ultimately, I Learned a
lot about just identity and being my own person during that
time. And that's very important. Be able to
accept maybe whatever the situation is or whatever path
you're on and owning that and being part of that. Because if I was
still living my path as a kid, I grew up in punk rock and
skateboarding. I had a skateboard shop. I'd still be 50 year
old skateboard Jeff. And those skills that I learned though,
running around the streets at night and, you know, doing
crazy things, helped define me and become a,
become a business owner, a marketer, a podcast host. I'm able to do
these other things because of the skill set that I developed as a
kid, being independent. And those things, not
only did they, I don't know if they define who I am, but they help
certainly shape who I am. And, and we're going to get into your story here.
We're going to add CEO to this title too, because there's a lot of things
that happen. And tell us a little bit about as you evolve.
You get out of college, you get your master's, you're working this
job, and now you're starting to see things, or you
have the skill set now to help people
and do you immediately go into starting a company? How
do we get to individualize in 360?
Yeah. So I would say years into my work as a health care
strategist, I had this jarring realization that
our healthcare system is pretty broken. While there are
so many devoted, brilliant people, doctors, researchers,
public health leaders who genuinely want to promote health
and heal people, the system that we operate in is
built like a business. And unfortunately, it really does profit off
of sickness, not necessarily health. So back when I was
studying at Columbia, in our classes, we would study
hospital budgets and case models that revealed that, you know,
chronic disease isn't just common, it's actually economically
essential. And without it, our current system, the way that it's structured,
really wouldn't survive. So there was no real
space, financially or logically, for that root cause,
healing. And things that I was very drawn to, like
lifestyle interventions, I found out weren't patentable, they're
not profitable, they're not reimbursable. And that's when I really
started to think, there must be another way. So
my journey kind of took an unexpected turn where I finally
really had the space. And I do owe this to Covid.
If one positive thing came out, it gave me more space to kind of sit
and ask myself, what am I interested in and what do I
actually want to do? And what emerged was this kind of deep
pull towards altered states of consciousness and their
potential to really heal the body, unlock creativity
and optimize our performance. So that
curiosity led me to India, where I was living in an
ashram and studying Kriya yoga, a meditative
discipline rooted in breath control and self realization.
And from there I became certified as a flow states coach and I dove
more into the neuroscience of peak performance and presence.
I was trained in psychedelic integration, studying the powerful effects of
plant medicine. And then I continued my training as a breathwork
and trauma informed healing facilitator, exploring how the body
holds trauma, holds emotion, and the ways we can
regulate our nervous system to heal ourselves. So really,
each path started to reinforce this same truth of
healing being really multidimensional. And it really happens at this
intersection of science, energy and self awareness.
And it has to involve the whole person. There was
a movie in the 1980s, I think you said, you said the
title and a little bit of the plot. It was called Altered States.
And it was a movie about a guy taking psychedelics in
isolation chambers, trying to tap into millions of
years of evolution and, and I don't know anything about.
So this is what, this is where I get excited in the show because I
also heard you say flow state and I don't even understand what that is.
Tell me, when you're studying flow state, what is that?
Yeah, so flow is a actual. It's
an altered states of consciousness where we can think and perform at
our best. So this is something we can actually track. It's a
neurobiological signature, meaning there is a
decrease in the regions linked to
self criticism and self anxiety. So we actually
stop having that inner critic that tells us you're not doing the right
thing, you're not doing enough. We can kind of get out of that mindset
and we drop into just states of present in the moment.
So we're feeling more and we're thinking less, which allows us
to access these heightened states of creativity and
intuition. And there's also the default
mode network in the brain that starts to quiet. And those are
really where patterns are tied to our self identity, what we're
supposed to be doing. That's where we can start to release
trauma, where we can tap into fields of expanded possibility.
So the possibilities in this state
really are endless. And the more that we tap into it throughout the week, the
more we can kind of find our purpose and explore these
deep states of performance and healing. Are
they enhanced with plants or medicines or.
We've heard the term microdosing in the news in the last couple
years. Is that part of this same type of study?
Yeah. So I would say that they're all different, they all promote different
states, especially in the brain, but really they're all
trying to get you more in touch with your intuitive side and less in touch
with the analytical thinking mind all of the time.
So psychedelics, what's very cool, even in a microdose, which is a
sub perceptual dose, meaning it's like 1/10 of a
recreational dose. So you're not supposed to feel trippy, you're not
supposed to have these crazy hallucinations or anything, but it
allows you to kind of create a distance within yourself and within your
own mind. So that when you do see these patterns of reaction,
maybe you, you know, blew up on someone that you
love because you got into an argument, or you feel that road rage in
traffic, or you feel an emotional breakdown over something minor
happening. It allows you to kind of create space to be like,
why am I reacting in this way? This
may be, you know, just something I'm used to, but it's not something that I
actually have to keep choos. So I would say
that psychedelics are more for that distance and that observation to
change those patterns and flow are when we can actually turn
off the kind of self critical parts of us. What can we
explore that's really possible? Is that something you can
enable like through meditation or. I saw there's breath work
involved. Is there a state that you can put yourself into, you know,
without plants or, or medicines? Definitely.
And psychedelics are not for everyone and I wouldn't
recommend that just anyone go out and try them because you have
to be deeply intentional and make sure that they're right for you. But
meditation and breath work is something that
anyone can do and we can access those states on demand
from the comfort of our homes, from our work offices in the
heat of an argument. They're really tools to help us
biohack our nervous system and either
intentionally calm it down or energize it and drive
focus for the moment. So these are all really just tools of
getting us more in touch with our body and how we can use that.
Do you find that people with
trauma or someone like me, Gen X, who has
had all these emotions and we were kind of brought up to like, you know,
push that down, you know, don't cry, don't show anybody that
you have feelings or emotions or don't tear up. Like do
you find that maybe people in trauma or people who have Just been
suppressing these feelings. Really react well to
therapy like this. Definitely that release
for some people can be physical, where you are allowed to
have a release where you're crying or screaming or
your body is shaking. For other people, it is mental. The
aha. Moment of wow, I have been really
trapped and affected by this one experience that I thought I had kind
of pushed to the wayside or I thought I had gotten over. But it's
still coming up when I'm doing this work. And I think the really
cool thing about trauma informed approaches now is that
we've started to understand that trauma doesn't always look like these
dramatic or catastrophic events. It actually can be quite
subtle in the moments you may have felt dismissed as a child or
ashamed for expressing your emotions or pressured to be someone you
weren't. When we say trauma, we're not talking about the
event itself. We're talking about the energy that is actually
trapped in the nervous system that you feel you can't escape from.
So trauma isn't really defined as what happened. It's defined by how your particular
nervous system responded when it didn't feel safe,
seen, or supported. So by restoring that
sense of safety and agency and attunement, we're not just
revisiting those painful memories, we're actually helping the mind and
body start to feel safe enough to let go of those survival patterns.
Burns. About seven years ago, my daughter,
we were riding bikes and my daughter got hit by a drunk driver. I was
behind her and he came around the corner and just hit her.
And she was injured. And I thought I dealt with it
and you know, with the therapy, I talked through it, but it was May 15th.
And I'll tell you, every May 15th, Google pulls up my
photo history and like, hey, this, you know, check it out. Last, you know,
this day seven years ago, and I see a picture of the
smash bike and I see the, the her leg was
swollen and all these things, like it just floods these emotions back all the time.
And like you're saying, like, maybe I haven't dealt with it right, because
I'm still having some sort of physical reaction every May
15, every time Google shows me these pictures again
and again and again and again. So you have something I
probably could benefit very much from therapy like this that would
really help me get past these emotions, trapped emotions,
or this neurological reaction that I have every
May. May 15th. Yes. And that is because
trauma lives in the body. It affects our mind and
the way that we think and perceive our environment. But it does live in the
body. So what we had found. I started the
visualizing 360 with my mom, who's a neuropsychologist. So she was doing
traditional therapy for years. And she started hitting a
roadblock where people were saying, I've
talked for five years, I've done this work, but for some
reason, like you said, I'm still getting that emotional reaction.
And that's where we kind of started to breed a new form of
wellness where it needs to integrate the mind and the body.
So we need talk therapy. It's a valuable tool. We need
to rewire our thought patterns and get into some of that.
But we also need to do the work on the body to actually get that
release so that your body now feels safe enough
on that day in May to not anticipate the past
reoccurring. You said some people have like,
a physical reaction. I'm not saying that this is
tied to your. But sometimes there's businesses that have
popped up in the last five years, especially since COVID called rage
rooms, where people can go in and have a physical reaction
and just destroy the room for, you know, an
hourly price. Does. Does any. Does that
sound like something that, you know, Some people are doing it for entertainment,
obviously, but is there some therapy in,
like, having a. A physical reaction like.
Like that, like those types of scenarios? Yeah, of
course. Because again, by allowing yourself to have that
reaction and just express your anger, you are
confronting it. You are admitting that you're angry and acknowledging it
and acknowledging what happened to way. So that in
and of itself is cathartic. Because a lot of this work starts with just
acknowledging the way that you feel and not shaming yourself for
feeling that way. Because a lot of us kind of tell ourselves, like
you said, push it down. You know, it wasn't that
big of a deal. It really, you know, it's all good now. And we get
locked in this feeling of. I really haven't processed that and given myself
the space to move through that. So in a rage room, like, that's an amazing
tool. And if that's what helps, because you're able to express
that, I fully support that. And we talked
a lot of trauma. And are there other areas where this is
beneficial? Maybe performance wise, maybe athletics?
Where else can you see the visualize in 360 helping people?
Definitely. So our name comes from one of
the most popular performance enhancement techniques used by
athletes, which is visualization. So it's really about
creating a picture in your mind and getting the
associated excited feeling about attaining that picture.
And that's kind of the process of visualization. It's
been really siloed into athletics because I think it just lends
itself very well. You know, you have the exact picture of what you want.
Athletes have direct training, so it's just part of their training. But
we can use visualization in everyday life.
It's valuable for athletes, but it's also valuable for someone who
wants to manifest better health in their body body. For someone
looking to attract a new relationship. It's really.
It's not necessarily a spiritual concept for what I think is.
It's more of a neurological process. So you're training your
brain to actually align with what you want instead of what you
fear. So it's about rewiring that internal
landscape and your thoughts and emotions and your behaviors to support
your goals instead of self sabotaging. Because we all
have these cognitive biases. We have a negativity bias,
we have performance blocks that are telling us
it's unlikely. You haven't achieved this in the past. What would make you
think that you have any hope now? That's just a
survival instinct that all humans have. So once we can
kind of work with those and literally rewire them
by doing practices like visualization, the brain
starts to pay attention to new opportunities and it starts to actually
give us motivation to move towards goals that once felt
impossible and unlikely. So it's really all about
these practices that change the brain in our daily life.
How about other things such as nutrition, diet and
nutrition where something I certainly struggle with, like I would say I
visualize about cheeseburgers all the time when I should be making
better health choices. Is there areas here
where you're working with people to, you know, build a better or visualize
a better diet, plan a healthier lifestyle? Does this also
help people like that? Definitely. We taught,
we talk a lot about the mind gut connection, which for
a while we thought that if what we
eat affects our mental health or. Sorry, we
thought that what we think can affect our mental or our stomach.
So if you get nervous on a test, you'll get butterflies in your stomach if
you get nervous. But now we're noticing that it's actually
bidirectional, meaning that what we eat and what the
contents in our stomach can affect our mental health. It can start making us
more anxious or more depressed or just more prone to
burnout and things like that. So learning about the
way that diet and what you eat has an impact on your
mind, I think goes a huge way in helping people to reframe.
Okay. I do need food as fuel? Not necessarily.
I have to look at kind of my patterns and adjust from here,
but also the idea of focusing on what you gain rather
than what you have to give up. Because a lot of the times with diets,
they trick us into just don't think about the
cheeseburger or think about if you don't have the cheeseburger.
It's the fixation on the loss when we
turn it. And really open your mind up to the new possibilities
of you're going to be in excellent health. You're going to be able to do
X, Y and Z, and you're going to be able to have a cheeseburger when
you want. Not feeling needed to all the time or just
compelled to because it's some sort of addiction that gets people
really excited and that changes the brain to be like, okay, I'm
not giving it up forever. I'm just changing my habits and I'll be
able to have a different relationship with it going forward.
Yeah, I think I became an adult during the rise of the
Food Network and the term foodies became a thing. So
to me, food is like an activity.
Food is something that you do. You go, go to a restaurant and experience
things. It's only in the last three to six
months where I, like you said it, where I started thinking about
food as fuel, not this thing I, I do
like you would learn to yo, yo or ride a bike or you know, do
something as an activity. I gotta, I stopped thinking about food as an
activity and now I see food as fuel as a
way to get through the day and not as a reward for every
possible meal of the day. So that's a great tip, what you said.
Food is fuel. It's not this crazy thing
you have to be immersed in. Three meals a day
plus three snacks a day. Definitely.
And food being an activity is one of them. Food is also our coping
mechanism when we get stressed. It's also how we deal with
boredom. There's a lot of emotions tied to fuel. So
something I like to remember is the mind will want many things, but the
body only needs a few. And the more you can tap into listening to what
your body needs in that moment, the better choices you end up making.
Through all of this, anything surprised you or have
you learned things about yourself or about this business
model that you're doing with visualize in360. Anything been
like completely shocking. Like I never would expected that end result. But
here we are and it's something that's really working. I think
that realizing that the brain really is a
supercomputer. We think of it as just, this is who we are.
We're prone to our personality type and our genetic disposition
and what we like and what we dislike. We all think that's very
fixed. But the brain is a computer, and
often it's just running on very outdated programming that a lot of
us didn't have lot of insight to when we got programmed. So that's our
upbringing. That's just experiences that happened in our
adulthood. And we just keep reinforcing the pattern
because we don't know any other way of being. We don't even know that that
change is possible. And seeing people who
are just so stuck in maybe debilitating health issues
or unfulfilling relationships or blocks,
performance blocks or blocks when it comes to making money
or things like that. And they start literally just changing the
simple ways that they think and reinforcing new mental
habits throughout the day. They're literally reprogramming a new code.
And it's just been incredible to see that transformation. It's something that
we can see and measure, and then it's also something that people can
feel and they can really convey that
this is something that is something they really would
have wanted to know their whole life. And it happens at any age.
So it's just really showing that there's so much about the brain and body that
we still have yet to learn. But we do have the tools at our
disposal to start making those changes. Now,
you use the term outdated hardware or
outdated software for our brain, and I think about that a lot,
because society has changed so much. Not in 50
years, even in 20 years,
we haven't had time to evolve and catch up with the pace of life.
Do you see that conflict between what people
entering your practice are capable of compared to
what they're trying to immerse their lives in? All this
overstimulation and cell phone addiction is
certainly playing a part of this where our brains just aren't ready for all
of this. No, definitely we're too
overstimulated, which is making it very difficult to
actually slow down and think about who we are and what
we actually want. Because the world is kind of just grasping at us
to take our attention in different ways. And what
I would say is your attention is your power. The things that you
focus on and the things, how you spend your time with
that focus is what's going to manifest in your
life. What you give your energy to is what is going to keep
being the circumstances that you're experiencing.
So realizing that the brain is a supercomputer is really important
because you stop seeing these reactions that you've always
kind of been accustomed to as flaws or just parts of who you
are. And you start seeing them as ways that you can adapt
to a new sense of self. So it becomes less about
fixing yourself and more about regulating your nervous system in
real time so that you could spend energy and focus
doing things that you want and doing things that
make you feel alive and make you feel purposeful and
excited and things like that. So remembering that the brain is going
to execute on whatever code that you put into it
and you're going to take on the programming that you get throughout the day. So
it becomes really intentional with what are you looking at? Who are you
talking to? How do you spend your free time?
That's something that I think everyone should really start considering more and more as we
enter more of the technology age. And you said
you, you started this visualizing 360 around Covid. Is that
when this company came about?
No, Covid was really when I started exploring the
non traditional paths of medicine. And I did
some traveling, not right away, but obviously when the
pandemic kind of subsided and it started really just
getting me in touch with where do I want to put my focus.
Do I really want it in these settings where people are saying that this
is the fifth doctor they've tried and nothing's working, or do I want
to go and explore what might work for some people,
bring it in a package that allows people to explore a
lot of different modalities and see what works best for them.
So I was very drawn to that non traditional and traditional
approach. Company's been around a year, a couple years so
far. Where do you see it going in four or
five years? How do you see it evolving and reaching out
to more people? I think that we're really
at this forefront of a new paradigm in healthcare
and that's going to integrate science, technology and
consciousness to treat the whole human, not just the symptoms.
So I don't really believe that the future of healthcare is clinical. I believe that
it's going to expand into all of the different
aspects of society that we like receiving our health. You know,
wellness centers and yoga studios and maybe psychedelic
clinics and just really expanding health in a way
that we haven't known before and helping it to be more
personal, preventative and deeply empowering.
Restoring that power of I can heal myself and I can
achieve the things that I want is kind of of, you know, at
the forefront of our minds and where we want it to go. So I think
the brain data, somatic intelligence, energetic
alignment are all going to work together to help heal people at the root level.
And we're just excited to be a part of that and kind of lead that
charge. And people want to work with Visualize in360.
Do they have to be in Los Angeles or do you do remote sessions?
How does it. How does it work if somebody wanted to become a client or.
Or. Or, you know, embrace this type of. Of
therapy? Yeah. So we are online,
so we take clients from all over the country, even
internationally as just English speakers at this
time. We're looking to translate our program into multiple languages
so you can find us online. We service people from all over the country.
It's very easy to connect with us that way. We also have remote
QEEG brain maps that can be shipped to your home,
so you never really have to travel anywhere, deal with the
boundaries of having certain resources. We make
it pretty accessible. Awesome. Tessa, this has been so much fun.
I've learned so much in 30 minutes. My
brain is reeling, trying to think of all the things I could really use
to correct some of my problems. And I appreciate you sharing
all this with us tonight. Visualizein360.com
I think is the correct web address. Reach out, see
all the services that they offer. A ton of information on the website.
Tessa, thank you again. We're going to send it out with
that theme song.
With Roots in the Science and eyes on the light.
She's helping us heal through the darkest of night.
She's Tessa Santarpia, bold and bright.
And she's joining Jeff Reilla on My Guest Tonight.
Where spirit meets science and stories ignite.
So tune in now. This moment feels right.
