Aproteem Choudhury is a mind-body interventionist who focuses on integrative behavioral health consultancy and public health with six years of experience empowering traumatized clinical populations, communities, and healthcare institutions. He’s incredibly skilled at building relationship-driven partnerships that activate our capacity to heal trauma, understand ourselves, and face challenges with practical and accessible mind-body skills.
Today, he joins the show to talk about generational trauma, his passion for serving others and the incredible work he’s doing with families and pediatric populations at Texas Children’s Hospital.
Key Takeaways
01:22 – Aproteem Choudhury joins the show to talk about his background as a mind-body interventionist and the incredible work he’s doing in the community of Uvalde, Texas
06:38 – Service-oriented activities
11:35 – How trauma spans multiple generations both in the past and in the future
20:18 – Working with families at Texas Children’s Hospital
23:20 – Dr. Flowers thanks Aproteem for joining the show and for the great work he’s doing and lets listeners know where they can connect with him
Resources Mentioned
J. Flowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com
J. Flowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655
Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen
Aproteem’s LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/breathewithapro
**The views and opinions expressed by our guests are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of J. Flowers Health Institute. Any content provided by our co-host(s) or guests is their opinion and is not intended to reflect the philosophy and policies of J. Flowers Health Institute itself. Nor is it intended to malign any recovery method, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.
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The Mind-Body Connection With Aproteem Choudhury
Introduction To Mind-Body Medicine
Welcome, everybody, to Understanding the Human Condition. I’m your host, Dr. James Flowers. I am super excited to have my new friend, Aproteem Choudhury, with us. Apro, how are you?
I’m doing good. I just celebrated a birthday, trying to stay cool.
Do you mind the number? What’s the number?
The number is 30. Officially an adult now. I can begin my career.
Do you feel different at 30 years old versus two days ago?
It felt like a Tuesday, honestly. I went to work. I got to work with a young girl at Texas Children’s, where I’m a mind-body interventionist. It was a lovely way to start the day with service. When I ended the day, I had a conversation with some folks in Uvalde, Texas, where I’ve been working over the last year, bringing mind-body medicine and mind-body practices to a small group of clinicians who are working and have been working.
Kind of frontline clinicians. First responding.
It’s the backbone of primary care in that community. It was a day of service.
I love it. I think that’s an amazing way to celebrate any birthday, number one. Your 30th birthday is a big deal. I still remember my 30th birthday, and you will always remember your 30th birthday, and you get to say you did it with service. That’s really super cool. You came into J. Flowers Health Institute a few weeks ago just to do a tour because you were intrigued and you wanted to know a little bit about what we’re doing. You told us about your career at Texas Children’s Hospital, which I’m blown away by. At 30 years old, you’ve done all the things that you’ve done. We invited you back for this podcast.
I want to read for our audience, Apro is a mind-body interventionist focusing on integrative behavioral health consultancy and public health, with six years of experience empowering traumatized clinical populations, whole communities, and healthcare institutions. He’s really very skilled at building relationship-driven partnerships that activate our capacity to heal trauma, understand ourselves, and face challenges with practical and accessible mind-body skills, which is the backbone of my philosophy as well.
You just mentioned Uvalde. I just saw that one of the moms who is traumatized from her daughter, I think, being killed that day, is running for mayor. You’re doing so much work there, and she’s trying to create change in the city as well, and really in the world. Tell us a little bit about your work in Uvalde and what you’ve been doing.
First of all, I have to start with just a moment to honor the community in Uvalde and give thanks and gratitude for their trust. So much of the work, and any of the work that we do through the Center for Mind-Body Medicine when we work with communities that have been traumatized, is about building trust and getting to know each other, just like we’re getting to do now. I can imagine it’s very similar in certain ways to the work that you get to do at J. Flowers in getting to know your clients and their families. That’s what we did over the first year, really getting to know these folks and hearing their stories, and coming from a place of invitation. This is what we have to offer. This is the work that we’ve done, and this is the way we’ve worked with whole communities before.
It’s been a gentle process of introducing what mind-body medicine is and showing how we can practically integrate mind-body medicine into what we’re already doing. It’s not saying that you forget about everything you’ve learned, forget about your education, or how you work with patients. It’s not that. It’s what you’re already doing and then finding moments of ease, finding a moment of connection with yourself, with how you’re feeling. A lot of it has been connecting with uneasiness, with discomfort. A lot of this work has been about giving people simple tools that they then get to decide how to bring into their lives, whether it’s in the clinic or at home with their kids.
Connecting Mind-Body Practices With Existing Therapies
Over the last year, we’ve really built up a strong foundation of understanding. This fall, we’re going to get to go back and do some workshops. In the winter, we’ll do an intensive five-day training with about a hundred people there. They’ll get to really experience small-group model practice skills, learn a lot, and be positioned to then lead the work in the community. People who are already committed, who are already natural leaders, who are already amazing clinicians, will then get to decide what this looks like.
What an amazing service opportunity. How did you decide that that was going to be one of your really service-oriented activities?
All of that work happened on accident. Let’s rewind back to 2017, back here in Houston after Harvey. At that time, I was convinced that I was going to go to medical school. Harvey happens, and then there’s this call to join this psychosocial disaster response. I told myself, “This is going to look really good on my med school application.”
They’re going to see that I go out and do community service.
I sit in this training, and it’s the work that we’re now doing at Uvalde. It’s coming together, sharing what needs to be shared. No one’s diagnosing you. No one’s trying to fix you. We’re coming together as humans. We’re teaching skills that help us connect more deeply to what’s happening in that moment. That’s a lot of what mind-body medicine is. That experience cracked me open in the best way possible. Needless to say, I never went to med school.
“The work that we’re doing in Uvalde is coming together, sharing what needs to be shared. We’re coming together as humans and teaching skills that help us connect more deeply to what’s happening at that moment, and that’s a lot of what mind-body medicine is.”
You found your calling?
Yeah, and I’m lucky.
Yeah, you are. I wish I had known you back then and introduced you to my niece, Marie Earthman, because even today, she’s traumatized from Harvey. She and her husband and one child at that time lived about 4 or 5 blocks from Brays Bayou. She was a little over eight and a half months pregnant when Harvey hit. The flood came, and they walked out of their house in the middle of the night, and the water was just at the top of the stairs. Her house was 5 or 6 feet off the ground. Water was coming up to the top of the stairs, and there was no one around to help, not at all.
She, to this day, still feels trauma in a pretty bad, heavy rainstorm. They moved into a penthouse of a high-rise. They sold their house, and literally, she chose the penthouse because she knew it wouldn’t flood or felt like it wouldn’t flood. She ultimately did some trauma work and some work around that. Just think of the millions of people in Houston that were traumatized from that flood who still experience that. That’s pretty amazing that that was what sparked your interest in doing this line of work.
Those floods still live on in the collective consciousness and unconscious field within Houston. There are many different kinds of traumas that live on and are just below the surface or impacting us. This work, when we start connecting to what’s going on, how we’re feeling, what is the message that our body is trying to communicate to us, as we get more familiar with that process, it pays incredible dividends to any kind of therapeutic work that you might be doing. That’s why this has been so easy and so sensible to integrate into the kind of work that we might do as behavioralists and clinicians.
That’s right, and then you put into that a pregnant female, and that trauma can pass down to the unborn child as well because her nervous system was responding so severely through that flood that generational trauma occurs even through an event like that.
That’s really the work that Rachel Yehuda and Felitti pioneered, looking at what is happening on a cellular genetic level. How are these wounds that happen within our lifetimes carried on, whether our lineage knows about it or not? That’s a whole other story.
We could do a whole five hours on that, or more.
Mind-Body Medicine And Cellular Healing
It’s real. This wisdom, and you might be familiar with it, comes from indigenous traditions. It points to when we do healing work, we’re impacting seven generations behind us and seven generations ahead of us. It makes me really think about what are the conditions necessary for us to be able to do that kind of work. What can we, as clinicians, do to support somebody’s journey? Mind-body medicine is just one part of the wide range of things that we need to attend to when we’re working with people or whole communities.
I was literally just talking about this yesterday with my niece and the seven generations behind us. We both come from a very traumatized family and a very traumatized background. The amount of trauma that goes back generation after generation and how that affects the next seven to ten generations. Talk a little bit more about your understanding of that, generations prior to us and the generations after us.
I don’t know if we have enough time to do a comprehensive history of all the ways humans have been traumatized. I think there’s plenty going on for us to just get a sense of how we might be impacted just right now. To think back to all the past suffering, the wars that are continuing, as I think about it from a macro perspective, it’s those past sufferings and those past traumas, and the fact that they have not been resolved, that is why certain things are continuing and why we’re seeing these cycles and seeing these things that are happening day to day, within families or within communities, happening on a global scale.
How that impacts us into the future, when it comes to our health, it’s very clear that there are serious epigenetic concerns when trauma happens. This can exacerbate conditions that you’re predisposed to. One way to think about this is that there is traumatic stress, and traumatic stress, when that happens, sets off a cascade of different functions within the body that are actually natural, adaptive, and protective. Many of these functions are inflammatory in nature.
What we’re really looking at is stress or trauma leading to inflammation. That inflammation creates a condition within the body that makes us more susceptible to any kind of disease, any kind of environmental influence. Our diet becomes more affected. Looking at this from a whole-person, whole-human perspective, that’s happening physiologically.
Interestingly, biobehaviorally, looking at how we navigate through the world and how it’s talking about personal philosophy, how we are making the most and doing the best with what we have, a lot of what we’re inheriting, for example, this trauma, preconditions us to operating within certain kinds of patterns of behavior, which sometimes get pathologized. Sometimes, we can operate with those patterns of behavior functionally, and we don’t need a diagnosis or we don’t meet the conditions for a diagnosis, but those patterns of behavior may still be causing harm, may still be leading to impacts within us or around us, within our families, within our work, that might need to be examined.
The way in which we interact with others throughout the day, whether it’s with our patients and what our patients tell us, whether it’s with our families when we go home, whether it’s really with anyone, it’s in our subconscious, it’s in our tissue. As you said, it’s at the cellular level. Learning how to work with that and understand it is a process.
It’s a practice.
It is a practice. That’s a much better word than a process. It is an ongoing practice of understanding what is in our subconscious mind and how it affects every movement and thought we have throughout the day.
“So, what’s in our subconscious mind and what’s living in ourselves signals to ourselves and sends messages to ourselves. That’s a lot of what mind-body medicine allows us to look at and interact with – this process that’s already happening.”
What’s in our subconscious mind and then what’s living in our cells, and how that also is signaling to us, sending messages, that’s a lot of what mind-body medicine allows us to look at and interact with. This process is already happening, so now we get to engage with it. When we engage with it, we are able to become more regulated physiologically and psychologically. Becoming more regulated, in plain speak, means we feel better. Feeling better is really important for doing anything.
We hope that’s the ultimate goal.
It helps us understand what we need to understand when we are feeling better. A lot of that work is about getting people to install those programs so that they can do it for themselves. We’re uninstalling viruses and installing new, healthy programs, new ways of thinking, new ways of navigating reality, literally training your mind and implementing these fundamental principles of neuroplasticity. That’s what the hope is.
The Power Of Neuroplasticity In Healing
I was just reading before you came in that we have more than 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain, and we have the power to retrain those neurons. It goes from everything, from chronic pain syndrome, all signals of pain. It goes to our depression. It goes to our dreams and what we want to do in our life, and believing that we can change negative into a positive and achieve whatever it is that we want in life.
What’s so fascinating about mindfulness as a tool that we can implement into our daily life, into our healing journey, and what makes mindfulness different than relaxation, hypnosis, or acupuncture is that mindfulness is, and we’ve been able to look at this through very recent advanced neuroimaging technologies, fMRI-based technologies. This is research, if anybody’s interested, this is research coming out of the Zeidan Lab at UCSF. Fadal’s a good friend, and he’s an eminent neuroscientist, chronic pain researcher, Department of Anesthesiology there. Some of this research is pointing to how mindfulness actually operates on a part of the brain, which is the hypothalamus.
This is a part of the brain that essentially connects the external world, what we’re perceiving through all our senses, and then it connects that to our sense of self. Me, James, Apro. That bridge is what is being impacted when we practice mindfulness. What it’s actually doing is it’s turning down the volume of the signal of the hypothalamus. It’s diminishing our ability to engage in self-referential processes. We’re less able to identify with our me-ness. I’ll just leave it at that, and I’m curious to hear what you think about that.
I live it the same way you do every single day, and my background and training are in chronic pain, working with complex individuals who have chronic disease processes and chronic pain. It’s part of what we teach here every day to our patients. It’s part of, at the cellular level, what I believe. Mine goes from looking at the gate control theory of pain from Melzack and Wall at the University of Washington to his research at UCSF and really looking at the work, the same similar work we’re doing, they’re doing really at Stanford University.
It’s amazing that back in 1962, this was just coming out in the early ‘60s when Melzack and Wall started talking about the gate control theory of pain. It just continued to evolve into neuroplasticity and everything that we’re talking about today. I could talk about this, we could be sitting here all day long and continue to do this. Before we have to go, I want to know what you’re doing with this amazing knowledge that you have, this incredible depth of knowledge in mind-body work. What are you doing with this with children and families at Texas Children’s Hospital?
We still talk about the neuroscience, and we talk about it in a way that makes sense for the kids and their families. I think working with kids and families is such a privilege because you get to work with a complete system. So much of what happens, in general, in working with pediatric populations is that the child or the adolescent might think that they are responsible for the challenges that they’re facing. That creates a whole other complex, shame, guilt, that complicates the healing process and understanding.
“Working with kids and families is a privilege because it involves a complete system. Often, children or adolescents think that they’re responsible for the challenges they’re facing. That creates a whole other complex – shame or guilt – that complicates the healing process.”
When we have the families involved and when we’re teaching them these skills that help them find peace or a moment of ease when tensions are rising or there’s a disagreement among siblings, we get to practice these skills. We’ve heard from families that the child will tell the parents, “Mommy, I think it’s time to take a breath,” and vice versa.
Working with the whole family or a caregiver or anybody there who’s able to support and is invested in supporting that child is such a pleasure. That’s what we do. It’s much of what we discussed, but it’s fun. We have a lot of play involved and really emphasize this idea that these skills that we’re teaching you to regulate yourself, the effect is often amplified and more enjoyable when it’s shared. Co-regulation, how can we distribute the burden or the pressure or the challenge among others and share it and rely on this ancient technology of connection and being social beings?
I remember, I’m sitting here listening to you, thinking about the work that you’re doing with children. I was reflecting on my first experience of this, of really mind-body work. It was in 1976. My father had just died, had a heart attack in front of me and died. That’s traumatizing to any ten-year-old, and so my mother finds a great therapist, and I remember her so well.
I entered this group therapy program for young boys who were going through trauma. We were all the same age, and we would lay on the floor, and she would walk us through these breathing techniques and these mind-body techniques back in the early ‘70s when I was ten years old. I think every day about that experience and how it sparked my initial interest in doing this and continuing that research with my patients.
I think you’re making an absolutely immeasurable impact on the children and the lives that you’re touching, both at Texas Children’s, really around the world, and also in Vivaldi, where you’re doing so much of the work with traumatized, really, the city and the state of Texas. I appreciate you so much for what you do. I look up to you, and I think that I would love to spend more time visiting and have you back. Maybe we need to do a series of podcasts on this, but thank you for coming in. I really appreciate you.
Gratitude And Closing Remarks
Thank you, Dr. Flowers, for having me. I look forward to the dance. You never know what’s going to come. We’ve begun, and let’s see where we go.
I think a new journey is beginning. If you guys want to learn more about neuroplasticity and trauma work, please reach out to us at J. Flowers Health Institute. You can find us at JFlowersHealth.com. Thanks, and have a wonderful day. Thank you again.
Thank you. Take care.
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It is.
See you next week.
Thanks again, Robin.
Thank you.
Important Links
- J. Flowers Health Institute
- James Flowers on LinkedIn
- J. Flowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655
- Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen
- Texas Children’s
- Aproteem Choudhury on LinkedIn
