Elevating Wellness by Aligning Fascia and Breath With Deanna Hansen

Discover the transformative power of fascia with our special guest, Deanna Hansen, Deanna Hansen is a Certified Athletic Therapist and founder of Fluid Isometrics™ and Block Therapy™

This episode of "The Root of the Matter" promises to enlighten you on how fascia impacts both your physical and emotional well-being. Deanna opens up about her personal journey, recounting how an anxiety attack led her to unearth the pivotal role of fascia in maintaining proper alignment and nutrient flow throughout the body. Get ready to explore the fascinating connections between posture, diaphragmatic breathing, and the often-overlooked influence of gravity on our fascial health.

Unlock the secrets to enhanced vitality through diaphragmatic breathing. Deanna and I dive deep into the mechanics and benefits of this powerful practice, revealing how it can boost oxygen intake, improve posture, and even aid in weight loss. We also discuss the disruptive effects of pain, fear, and stress on natural breathing patterns and the resultant shift to shallow upper chest breathing. By integrating insights from influential works such as "Yoga and the Quest for the True Self" by Stephen Cope and "Breath" by James Nestor, we underscore the importance of reconnecting with natural breathing to slow down the aging process and enhance overall health.

Get practical tips on managing ailments like sleep apnea and snoring through proper breathing techniques and fascia decompression. Deanna shares wisdom on the healing power of breath, illustrating how proper breathwork can accelerate recovery from injuries and improve circulation. We also delve into the evolving shape and alignment of our skull and fascia, discussing their profound impact on health and appearance over time.

Learn about the holistic Block Therapy method, including practical exercises like using toe separators to improve fascia mobility and body alignment. This episode is packed with actionable insights to help you harness the power of fascia for optimal well-being.

Find out if Block Therapy is for you, visit https://blocktherapy.com/

To learn more about holistic dentistry, check out Dr. Carver's website:

http://carverfamilydentistry.com

To contact Dr. Carver directly, email her at drcarver@carverfamilydentistry.com. 

Do you want to talk with someone at Dr. Carver's office? 

Call her practice: 413-663-7372

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. Information discussed is not intended for diagnosis, curing, or prevention of any disease and is not intended to replace advice given by a licensed healthcare practitioner. Before using any products mentioned or attempting methods discussed, please speak with a licensed healthcare provider. This podcast disclaims responsibility from any possible adverse reactions associated with products or methods discussed. Opinions from guests are their own, and this podcast does not condone or endorse opinions made by guests. We do not provide guarantees about the guests' qualifications or credibility. This podcast and its guests may have direct or indirect financial interests associated with products mentioned.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Root of the Matter. I'm your host, Dr Rachel Carver, and today we have Deanna Hansen with us, who is a pioneer in the field of fascial decompression for physical and emotional transformation. Deanna's been working for 20-plus years. She's created this amazing tool that we call block therapy, and I became interested and learned about Deanna after hearing her on my buddy Kelly Kennedy's podcast, and I went and Googled your website right away and I was like, oh, she has something for TMJ. Look at how wonderful, because so many of us suffer from issues in this joint and there aren't a lot of great solutions really. We have Band-Aids and we have guards and this, and that. I'm still always trying to understand what is the cause of this and how do we actually fix the problem versus just Band-Aiding things. So we have had my own craniofascial therapist on, so we've talked about fascials way back, like the second episode, though, so I would love for you to first introduce yourself, and then we'll talk again and remind us all what fascia is.

Speaker 2: 1:08

Thank you so much, dr Carver, for having me here. It's an absolute pleasure to be sharing with their community and I just love diving into the world of fascia because it is literally the connector of every single cell in the body. So fascia is made of a combination of collagen and elastin and, when perfectly balanced, these two proteins create both mobility and stability in the body. So back a little bit about me. I was an athletic therapist, certified in 1995, at the age of 25 and 54 now, and I was having some real struggles with my own personal health and my own body and as a result, I made some major changes by the time I was 30. But these changes resulted in serious anxiety attack and it was this one anxiety attack in particular that was the seed of everything to come and how I really started to understand this tissue fascia and how it truly interconnects every single aspect of the body fascia and how it truly interconnects every single aspect of the body.

Speaker 2: 2:07

In this moment of anxiety I actually thought I was going to die because I was locked away from my breath, frozen with fear. So for some reason I dove my hand deep into my abdomen and the first thing I encountered was pain. Now, I avoided ever touching this area because I was 50 pounds overweight, even though I was working really hard to have a healthy and fit body. Though I was really ashamed of this area, never touched it. Now here I'm, diving into it. The first thing I feel is pain, but the pain brings me out of my crazy thinking. I'm brought back to the ground. I recognize okay, you're breathing, you're safe. But then I continued to explore with my hand in this tissue and what was fascinating to me as an athletic therapist floor with my hand in this tissue and what was fascinating to me as an athletic therapist, always focusing on deep tissue work. I was very aware of what scar tissue felt like in bodies. Now, here I am in this tissue and it feels marbled with scar tissue, even though I haven't had any injury or surgery in this area. And suddenly I had all these aha moments. Wow, no wonder when I'm coming back from a five mile run dripping wet with sweat, my belly would still feel cold. And at the same time, I also started the practice of yoga and I had a fantastic teacher, my very first class, and about every 30 seconds she would remind us to breathe. And every reminder I'm like, wow, I'm not breathing properly or hardly at all. So this all became part of my really deep understanding of fascia and now to date, I've probably spent well over 60,000 hours diving into the fascia, whether other people or my own body, and I have a really intricate understanding of what's going on between the layers. So here we have this fascia that literally, in the way that I see it, is the cell membrane of every other cell membrane interconnected. And if we have this beautiful balance of collagen and elastin throughout the body, there's space to support proper cell alignment. And this is the key here we want to make sure that all of those cells are in correct space or alignment, because if that's true, then there's optimal space in and around the cell and space allows for absorption of nutrients into the cell, as well as the taking away of the toxins and negative emotion, even away from the cell. So as long as that system is nice and open, there's flow.

Speaker 2: 4:17

The challenge that we have is, first of all, most of us aren't conscious of posture and diaphragmatic breathing and we have this force called gravity that is constantly pulling us down toward the earth. But we don't compress in a linear fashion. We wind down one way or another, energy moves in waves and spirals. There's no straight lines in nature. So even the way that the body ages is patterned based on this viral patterning of how energy travels. So as we get older, essentially what's happening as we start tipping off balance, the collagen starts to migrate from this equilibrium or balance. So if I'm right-handed which I am, and 70% of the people I believe are I tend to tip over to the left side because I want to keep that right side free for action. So, unconsciously, over time, we're continually shifting from our perfect center. And it's not a force in a moment, unless we have an injury. This is a continual downgrading of the system. So the collagen is constantly migrating to create these structural supports in the body so that we don't tip over. But they continue to accumulate and again, they don't just stack linearly, they are spiraling and gripping onto anything in its path with a force up to 2000 pounds per square inch.

Speaker 2: 5:41

This is the part that just, I think, is so fascinating, because we are literally held out of alignment with this crazy force, but it's a magnetic seal.

Speaker 2: 5:50

So what that means with regard to teeth health, jaw pain, all of these things we need to really look at what are the support systems in the body to keep these cells in correct alignment? And if they're not, what happened? Because ultimately, what's happening with the jaw? If it's not situated properly, then it goes into this contraction, so people have pain here, they might be chewing more on one side than the other and that's going to create asymmetries, because it's what we do all the time that matters most and ultimately builds up to create the scenario that we're in now. And what I've really seen and this is the part that's really exciting is when you look at a full body's alignment, which, if we're addressing the fascia, we need to, because if we're just going to address the area of pain or issue, that's not going to get us out of the situation. We need to understand the patterning and what's causing us to be pulled out of alignment and how to correct that. So what? You know what?

Speaker 1: 6:44

I want you guys to all hear is that it's very important to have space around ourselves. She mentioned absorption. So we talk about all the time like nutrition. It's so important. We want to have healthy teeth, healthy bodies, but and I've said many times if you can't, you can have the healthiest meal, but if you can't absorb it, it's not doing you any good. So this is why I'm having another talk about fascia, because it really is.

Speaker 1: 7:06

Nobody really understands this. It's becoming a thing, kelly, and you're really bringing it to the forefront, which is awesome, but, again, it's important. This is why this proper alignment, why posture, why breathing is so vital. We've got to have space around the cells, as Deanna said, to absorb our nutrients and to also release all of the toxins that are building up day in and day out. And, as she's saying, as we age, we start to compress more of this fascia. Therefore, there's less and less space between our cells. Therefore, it's like we're holding on to those toxins. So we were holding on to those more and we can't get rid of them, nor can we get the nutrients in that help us expel these.

Speaker 1: 7:48

So this is why it's really important for us to understand the fascia system, and she also mentioned the emotion. We've talked a lot about that on the podcast too how we know we fold emotions in our body. So understanding a little bit more about the fascia and how we can work on it is really interesting. One thing that you mentioned in that podcast with Kelly which I thought was fascinating is we all know stress causes all sorts of problems. But okay, we can understand that concept. But physiologically I didn't really understand. And you talked about stress physiologically will compress that fascia. So again we're talking about stress compressing the fascia, not allowing us to absorb the nutrients, not allowing us to release whatever that negative circumstance.

Speaker 2: 8:33

Maybe that led to that stress which is really really fascinating, and this is a great segue to really talking about the diaphragm, because when we're talking about the fascia, again, it's all about keeping everything in right position. But, most importantly, we've got this beautiful muscle, the diaphragm, and it is a plate of muscle that rests at the base of the rib cage. When it's strong and it's working properly, it's moving up and down in the core of the body, giving the organs, the heart and the lungs a continual massage. This is like the body's furnace or engine. Here's the challenge, because the diaphragm is the only muscle in the body that is under our conscious and unconscious control. And if we're not conscious, diaphragmatic breathers and if you're not, we're going to still breathe, but in a very different way. And the challenge is pain, fear and stress. All three of these things cause us to reactively hold the breath. So if you see a deer, for example, that survives an attack, they shake, they release that negative energy that came in during that traumatic event. We as humans, though we don't tend to go into that release mode, we get into this mode of oh my gosh, something happened, the diaphragm locked, and then we don't let that go, and then from that point, we age from that perspective. So now we start breathing through the muscles of the upper chest because we're designed to survive, so that's going to happen. But we're also designed to thrive. But we need to be conscious breathers for the thriving as opposed to just the surviving. So now, if we're breathing through the muscles of the upper chest, the challenge is that the base of the lungs is where the majority of the alveoli, the oxygen receptor sites, reside. So if we're taking these like shallow upper chest breaths, we're not pulling the air deeply enough into the lungs to reach this bed of abundance.

Speaker 2: 10:22

And in the book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, stephen Cope mentions that we can feed the body 600% more oxygen breathing diaphragmatically than breathing through the muscles of the upper chest. Also, it's been shown that 84% of weight loss comes through proper exhalation. So this takes me back to when I was in my 20s and I'm working out like a fiend and I'm getting bigger and more compressed and more toxic with every step of the way and I'm working hard. So it wasn't like there was a lazy thing going on here and I was dieting as well. So it's like the rules of weight loss weren't applying to me. But I recognized it was because, ok, I have this frozen diaphragm, so my body is in this deep freeze. So, no matter how much energy I'm putting into it to try to increase my metabolism and start burning fat which I now have a very different understanding of as well it wasn't working.

Speaker 2: 11:14

So the diaphragm is really the key here, because this is how we feed oxygen to cells. And think of blowing up a balloon. If that balloon is fully blown up, it's round, it glows, it almost defies gravity. But take half of the air out, it becomes wrinkled, it attracts dirt and debris, it becomes heavy, falls to the ground. So over time, if we're not breathing and absorbing oxygen into all of the cells, they start to deflate and as they deflate they start pulling us out of alignment. They become heavier, those adhesions, that collagen migrate, that grips now that blocks even more blood and oxygen flow to cells and so on and so on, and we have this understanding of normal aging. But it doesn't have to be that way. But then, as it relates to what's going on in the face, in the mouth, in the jaw, as we start falling away, if I don't have support structures to keep everything in line, then everything starts to migrate one way or another, depending on what the rest of our body is doing. And that's really in a nutshell. What's happening is we have allowed the forces of gravity to pull us into our internal spaces and then our body is patterned in that way to prevent us from tipping over.

Speaker 2: 12:29

And it's that fascia patterning that is the challenge. And those grooves that get created in movement, those habits those are the things that we really want to understand that can create those problems. Even simply just if you're eating, chewing on one side all the time. That's going to create imbalance in this structure, so it can't work up and down properly.

Speaker 2: 12:49

And there was a fantastic book I love it Breath, by James Nestor, and he talks about the structure of the roof of the mouth, proper alignment of the tongue, how that impacts how we breathe, but how that also impacts the health of the teeth, the alignment of the teeth and all of those things. So all of these conveniences that we've been granted in the way that we live are actually taking away from how we're using our bodies and we're becoming very less efficient at using the body in the way that it was designed to be driven. So understanding what to do with your fascia is really about taking us back to how we are supposed to work most naturally, because it's the most natural thing for us to breathe diaphragmatically. But we've become so far pulled from that that now we need a little bit of reminding and a little bit of effort and discipline to bring the body back into balance so that we can restore health and create a very different pathway for how we age in general.

Speaker 1: 13:49

Now we've been talking about this I had a postural restoration therapist on too and we were also talking about the diaphragm and there's lots of studies showing if you diaphragmatic breathe, that also can prevent sleep apnea. Maybe a lot of sleep apnea is again improper breathing, as dentists always would be. Oh, your airway is very congested, but the more that I take these 3D x-rays I can have a patient on the x-ray. It looks like their airway is wide open, yet they have a diagnosis of sleep apnea. So it's not just structural.

Speaker 1: 14:17

There's much more to this whole idea of sleep apnea and snoring, and a lot of it comes from some people who said we know when we drink alcohol we're going to snore more. Why is that? That changes the way our breathing right? It depresses our respiratory, the system in the brain. So I think this is really important. And you talk about yoga and there's all these different modalities and we talk about belly breathing. So maybe you can help us like are we really supposed to be breathing through our belly? It really is the diaphragm right. So maybe you can help us. Are we really supposed to be breathing through our belly? It really is the diaphragm right. So maybe you can give us a little clarification. I'm sure some people are saying, okay, fine, but how do I breathe with my diaphragm? What's the instructions? How?

Speaker 2: 14:57

do we do this? The first thing is if you were lying on your back, for example, and you had your hands on your belly, when you inhale, the belly should become big. When you exhale, the belly should become small. Now here's the challenge that a lot of people that are talking about breathing exercises don't recognize or understand how to change. So now we have this fascia that will grip and adhere to bone with a force of up to 2000 pounds per square inch. So I'm just going to bring my camera down, okay. So here's my diaphragm. If I'm breathing properly, it's moving up and down. Now, if I fall in and this is my posture for decades I'm sitting in front of a computer with this lumped alignment. Now this plate of muscle, it's getting locked away in this alignment through here, and all of the adhesions that have gripped around my rib cage are now holding and sealing my diaphragm in a bit of a freeze, like a frozen shoulder. But we have a frozen diaphragm. So even if we now say, okay, I'm going to make conscious breathing a focus and we start going through this breathing, all you're going to have available is the amount of the diaphragm that you have available. With fascia decompression, we release those adhesions to bring more of that muscle into balance. If you were doing a forward bend and you had a hamstring that you felt, okay, my hamstrings are tight, I can only go so far. And you're stretching all the time to keep whatever level of length you have available for you, all you can do is what you have. But the thing is we've got adhesions wrapping and gripping with that muscle holding onto bone. So fascia decompression releases the holding pattern to give you more muscle to lengthen. So when we're talking about the diaphragm, when we start releasing the rib cage now, we actually start integrating more of this muscle, because this is the muscle that's going to be directing that blood and oxygen flow, giving that the body the heat, the energy in order to have enough momentum to send blood to all of the trillions of cells in the body.

Speaker 2: 16:59

Again, if we're breathing through the muscles of the upper chest, it's a very different dynamic. It's a weak breath. We are literally feeding a huge amount of reduction of oxygen into the bloodstream as well as that release. And I love again because we always are talking about the exhale as being the most important component of the breath, and they referenced this very beautifully in that breath book by James Nestor as well, because it comes down to the carbon dioxide now and this was. I loved reading it because it gave a whole new way of explaining it.

Speaker 2: 17:28

So the carbon dioxide in the cell is like exhaust in your car. If your car is sitting on the driveway and you don't have it started, there's no waste coming out of it. But you turn it on and there's exhaust. So same as the cells. When the cells are working they create waste. That carbon dioxide is the currency for the oxygen. We need that carbon dioxide to be able to allow the oxygen to release from the hemoglobin to go into the cell. So even if your blood is full of oxygen but you have a whole bunch of cells that are inactive, they're not creating that currency to allow that oxygen to jump in.

Speaker 2: 18:03

So we focus on the exhale as that primary piece of the breath. We're all going to naturally take an inhale. If you're suddenly holding your breath, you're going to go like it's that natural response to inhale but to fully exhale. That's where there's a bit more of a challenge, because that's also when the diaphragm is lifting against gravity. It's easier to take that in-breath too, because gravity is assisting the diaphragm as it's moving down. So here's this plate of muscle. When we inhale, the diaphragm moves down. When we exhale, exhale, it lifts and it's moving up and down like all the time. But that lifting takes more effort, more energy. So we teach people to focus exhale for a count of six, inhale for four, squeeze the belly small and then just naturally allow that breath to come in.

Speaker 2: 18:47

It's the exhale that we train people to make the focus. And then as you start melting those adhesions from the rib cage and you access more of this diaphragm, you a feel the difference posturally right away. And I have so many people sharing that when they leave a class and they get into their car they always have to fix their mirror because they're so much taller, and that's a good thing. We want to be the very tallest version of ourself because as we start compressing, we all know we tend to get shorter and wider as we age. So we want to go in that opposite direction. Let those adhesions go, fill that new space with blood and oxygen through the teaching of proper diaphragmatic breathing, but then also own that space.

Speaker 2: 19:26

And the tongue is part of this. It's part of the things that we teach, because there's a proper alignment for the tongue to help support the weight of the head. And I always say people get, get, they don't want a double chin. It's not a double chin, it's a weak, displaced tongue that we're dealing with. So if we actually understand what's going on, then we have a very specific roadway that we can actually undo things and at the roof of the mouth, about a pinky nail distance from the teeth, there's a ridge and the tongue should naturally dock in that ridge and support the roof of the mouth.

Speaker 2: 19:56

When I'm not conscious, my tongue will dart forward and to the right and then I end up clenching more on that left side. So we all have these patternings because we're dominant on one side. We're not symmetrical in our movements If we're right-handed. I was so right-handed that I was very twisted. I was a provincial volleyball player. I was a power hitter. I think of the number of times I rotated from one direction to another only and how that really created a lot of problems for me as I was getting older. I was playing as a teenager. So these patternings that get built into our body from what we just do all the time, they're the problems down the road that we need to understand and then do to be able to bring that body back into balance, to support proper cell alignment and then therefore flow.

Speaker 1: 20:38

Hey, you made a good point. We would call it in the mouth, the spot right. The tongue's got to rest on the spot right. So really interesting, especially for women who, like we don't want to have that double chin, that it's a lot about the muscle, like you said, the fascia kind of melting down with gravity. So how can we do? A tongue is the strongest muscle in the body, so we should work and we talk about our patients all the time with simple exercise. You can go on youtube, hit tongue exercise. You'll find all sorts of great stuff on there.

Speaker 1: 21:06

But interestingly, it's why children you see them suck their thumb a lot. And where is that thumb going? Going up into that spot right, and sometimes it's. I know with my youngest or my oldest. She was pulled out with suction so her whole body was, you know, from birth, a little bit out of alignment and I didn't know this at this time. She's, by sucking her thumb and putting it up in that space. That's also where the two sides of the energy systems come to meet in the body. It's trying to help her calm that nervous system to allow for alignment. Wow.

Speaker 2: 21:38

That's awesome.

Speaker 1: 21:39

Yeah, it's deeper interesting when we say, if your kid is a phone stalker, maybe think, hey, maybe we need proof of the FTE, we might need some fascial work because, again, we can't cut our kid's thumbs off. We don't and we know it can create problems in the mouth. But there's a reason. There's always a reason why we develop these habits. I think it would be so amazing if at every birth there was a fascial therapist right there but it got to squeeze through the tiny little canal. Of course there's going to be some fascial distortion there, right, and depending on like my kid she got suctioned out. All sorts of things can really impact that, and she's a person now who tends to have a little more anxiety and she's getting some pretty fascial.

Speaker 2: 22:22

Sorry. I love that you said that, because we actually have a video to teach parents how to address their baby's breath now, because the baby's breath is the mother's breath. I'm 54. My generation did not grow up in front of computers. They came into life later, where kids today, of course, they're starting in these negative alignments at a very young age. So the mothers of today, if you're a mother that's 25 years old today, you grew up in front of computers, you had this posturing and now you're the mother to this child coming out. Your breath is compromised the mother compared to generations earlier from the whole posture that technology has granted us.

Speaker 2: 23:04

So there's already a different breathing pattern to the babies coming out. And what I'm observing in a lot of babies is they're not breathing diaphragmatically where before older generations you saw it you breathe diaphragmatically and then over time you lose that breath because pain, fear and stress causes us to reactively hold the breath. But now I'm seeing babies not breathing that way and I truly believe that by we're seeing so many more challenges. So one really simple thing you can do and I'm just going to use my block here pretend this is the baby's rib cage, just putting a little bit of compression on the rib cage as you walk around for maybe one to three minutes, because that's going to generate that heat for those ribs and we're born to breathe this way, so they're going to naturally adopt that breath if the rib cage allows the space for them to do that. So just a really simple exercise, because you're carrying them around anyways most of the time. So just holding and squeezing.

Speaker 2: 23:54

I have a video too I can certainly share if people would like to see that. But yeah, I think that difference in the beginning as they're developing, it's a huge thing.

Speaker 1: 24:04

One other thing, before we get into the specifics kind of the faith and TMJ stuff. One other point I really liked that you talked about with Kelly was how inflammation is the goal when you're doing all this fascial work and most people would be like what Inflammation is terrible and it causes all these problems. But I'd love for you to explain that a little bit. And one other thing that I loved that you said was don't ever use ice, because I've been saying that forever and ever. No, we want circulation, we want heat. I am a big proponent of red light. I think everybody. I try to get everybody to have one of those in their first aid kit. I carry mine to my kid athletic event so I'm like forget the ice. No, it's all about the red light, but anyway, tell us a little bit about what you mean that inflammation is.

Speaker 2: 24:46

Oh, so let's say I sprained my ankle, so the body knows what to do. It knows how to heal. We just need to support the process. So I sprained my ankle. Now I have inflammation, just directed blood flow to this area. Because now there needs to be a little bit more energy. I need to go and heal this space. So like thinking of baking a cake if you have flour, sugar, egg oil, you mix it up, you have batter. If you put batter in the freezer, you have frozen batter. If you put batter in the oven, you bake cake.

Speaker 2: 25:15

So the second law of thermodynamics is nature abhors a gradient, which means when there's a gap in the system, nature's going to fill it in. So now I have a tear. It can be a tear in a tendon, a ligament, a muscle. It can be a break in the bone. Either way it's a gap. Our body is designed to rebuild. So now we get all this blood flow, this inflammation, being sent to the area. If we limit that inflammation through isin, we still have this gap. So now, instead of the body being able to have enough energy to rebuild, what's happening is all of the tissue around the gap. The collagen in that tissue is going to dump into the space like filling in a pothole.

Speaker 2: 25:55

Winnipeg has probably some of the worst streets in the world, at least here in North America, because we have such clay bays in the spring fiber year it's crazy. So the pothole that we have to navigate when we're driving are crazy, and then the city will go and they'll fill them in, but then the next rain and enough driving there is a hole again. So they're not repaired, they're not fixed. It's a band-aid. Basically, scar tissue that we understand today is that band-aid. It had the ability to heal like it should have been before the injury, but it needed the energy of the inflammation. So when we assist the inflammation through adding energy, through heat, through understanding proper breathing, through making sure that the channels for flow are open, then there's a very different healing opportunity than if we do it with icing.

Speaker 2: 26:44

So then let's say now we've got this sprained ankle and a year later and I've healed with scar tissue, which is typical. So now that scar tissue doesn't have elastability, it doesn't have life really. So now it becomes a barricade to even further float. So the body's still saying wait a sec. I still feel that I need to assist this space because there's all these cells that are struggling, so it keeps sending more and more inflammation because it's just reading it needs help. So this is now the scenario of, suddenly we become we have chronic inflammation. It's becoming stagnant, because the more adhesions, the less flow, the more body saying whoa, I need to send more. We get caught in this really weird cycle.

Speaker 2: 27:25

Inflammation, though, is what the body does to heal, but if it becomes stagnant now, it can become problematic to the tissue around that area, more acidic, and then again we get more inflammation. So we get trapped in these bases of chronic inflammation being the bad guy. All we need to do, though, is know what to do to heat that inflammation up, and that's turn on your engine. We need to get the breath awake again, because this is your furnace. If I live in a 30-story building, if I have a space heater only for my apartment, I can heat one room. When it's minus 30 outside, turn the building's furnace on. We can heat the whole building.

Speaker 2: 28:02

So your diaphragm is the furnace, the upper chest muscles are the space heater, and if I need to get energy all the way down to my foot with the space heater, I'm not going to get very far in that repair process, but once I turn on the diaphragm and I start understanding how to melt through those adhesions through the whole body, then I start to turn on the healing potential that was in that inflammation to begin with, because it's sitting there as potential energy but it's dormant because it's too cold.

Speaker 2: 28:30

If you've ever gone in, I love this analogy because if you've ever gone into a cottage in the winter and you turn the heat on and suddenly the flies that are there come to life, where were you? They weren't dead, they were simply hibernating. So we've got all of these cells hibernating because they're you know, they're that bear in the cave. They're pulled away from life. We need energy to have that life. So that's where that breath comes in, and restoring that flow throughout the body is so key because, whether it's been chronic inflammation or not, you've got all that healing in that space that has the potential to do its job of repair. So that's a huge reason why we don't want to be icing.

Speaker 1: 29:10

So we love that, because not everybody's got their red light handy, which is great, but you don't even need that. So, people, those of us who are cold all the time my older daughter, oh my gosh, she just is so breathing and I had a little heart mass that you put in your phone and we test her breathing and she just was so shallow breathing she wasn't being able to get that. Circulation was so absent. So those of us who have always felt like I'm always cold, I'm always cold. Let's look at the breath. We can layer up, but if we're so cold like that, we got to think that, hey, I'm not getting oxygen where it needs to go. Right, I've got to help that out a little bit. So, again, it all comes back to the breath, which is one of the most amazing tools that we have and we all have it and it's totally free. We all really need to have it harnessed. So, yes, thank you for that. That's real important and it's still very common.

Speaker 1: 29:57

My father had surgery on his hand and my mother's got him with an ice pack and I said no. I said you've got a red light next to your bed, use that instead, and my father's one. You have to prove everything to, and so I'm sending him these articles. There's plenty of articles showing no ice. I use this kind of therapy, so that convinced him, but not just what I would say. But it's funny that you talk about breath, because my mother just bought him this book, because actually one of his doctors told him about this, which I thought was amazing, and so now he's totally obsessed with this book and so anytime you talk to him now, it's because of your breath. Talk to him now it's because of your breath. Your breath, yeah. And I read this book four years ago when I was on vacation with him and I was trying, didn't matter, because he has to come, he has to read himself, which is great, but one of the things about breath, topic that I love too.

Speaker 2: 30:40

And again in that book, steven cope yoga in the quest for the true self, he's got a really fantastic chapter blaming the differences between the chest breather and the diaphragmatic breather, and even the brain frequencies they're different. With that diaphragmatic breath they're relaxed. We are in the bagel space, that parasympathetic nervous system, which we should be in 80 of our day. If we're breathing through those upper chest muscles, we're in stress pattern past and fear, or sorry, past and future, where fear lives. And so that's a huge thing to consider too, because if we're in that stress mode, what is the rest of our body doing when we're stressed? We pull in, we contract. If our hands are like this, that means our shoulders are contracted, and then what does that mean for the jaw and for the carotid arteries and the thyroid and the major lymphatic drainage site when we're all tight in this space?

Speaker 2: 31:31

And we've had a number of people get off their CPAP machines from doing this work, because really we've got to understand again if you're snoring and you think it's coming from here, what's underneath, that is the rib cage, and how is that alignment affecting what's going on through here? So that's the interesting part when we're looking at the body as a whole. We can't simply look at the area of concern, especially if we're dealing with, here too, what's happening with the arms and the hands. Anatomical position is palms forward. That's how we should be at rest. Who's like that? If you look at pretty much anybody, their palms are facing the back and just change. Bring your palms forward, turn them to the back, notice what happens to your rib cage. So that's one of the things that we prompt people to do is, when you're walking, have your palms forward, and it's interesting because people will always say, won't I look funny? It's like, isn't that funny? It'll be like pulling you forward and down, which is ultimately the problem.

Speaker 2: 32:26

Another interesting thing is I have a esthetician's program, and so this has been a really fun conversation because, of course, as estheticians, you're primarily working through here. So if you've got a jowl hanging and this is your posture all the time and gravity is like pulling the tissue down more and you try to fix this without changing this, you might get that. Oh, I just left the esthetician. I've got a nice glow to my skin, but that's not going to change the dynamic of what's happening in through here. That comes through changing the entire alignment of the body. I've got so many incredible before and afters that we can certainly add to this to show you also what happens to the shape of the skull if we've been positioned this way, and then we bring everything back and then the whole shape of the skull changes to create also more space for the brain.

Speaker 1: 33:17

So, speaking of, let's talk about how has the skull, how has that changed over time? You've kind of mentioned a little bit over time the technology and we're rounding forward and so it was interesting. I had an emotional code session yesterday and she was like geez, your sphenoid bone is totally out of whack and that's causing some emotional issues. I'm like, okay, interesting, which? That's the bone of the face that is often out. We talk a lot about that and when we're trying to correct kind of jaw shape and stuff, we've got to get that. Everybody thinks that the skull is static, but it moves all the time. There are little sutures and they can move and tell us a little bit about the skull and then continue that conversation about why TMD problems occur and why it's got to go a little bit deeper than just having a guard.

Speaker 2: 34:05

Yeah, and it's fascinating if you look at a photo of a person in their teen. Compared to, say, their 50s or 60s, the head shape very much changes. Usually it's a lot broader when we're younger and then as we get older, we're constantly shifting and migrating. There's 22 bones in the skull at least that's what it says on Google. Either way, though, exactly like these, there's space between all of the bones, so that changes it, and then we get an overlap of the bones and you can see that. You can see compression in the head over here, and then migration. So it's that migration of the collagen that create that.

Speaker 2: 34:46

And I have a hair health class, and this is really fascinating because what I teach people with my hair health class is to release the scalp from the skull. We should have, if you put your finger on your scalp and you move your fingers, it shouldn't be sticky Like the ear. You should be able to pull the ear away and it should be nice and mobile. A lot of people, if you tug on the ear, you don't see it lifting away because it's literally suctioned with those adhesions, with that 2,000 pound per square inch seal. So, as we start falling out of balance, what the fascia does.

Speaker 2: 35:16

What these adhesions do is they grip. We see people with calyx. That's the grip, because energy moves in waves and spirals. So now we've got a little grip, we've got a little grip. Both those grips make everything tighter and tighter.

Speaker 2: 35:28

It's in a vice. That's partly why people are going to have headaches or migraines, literally, as we get older and we allow the collagen to migrate. It creates a vice for what's going on up through here. So then if this isn't properly aligned and we're chewing, now we've got this joint that isn't working properly, and again, if we're chewing more on one side than the other, then we're going to get a buildup, we're going to get an imbalance, and then we're going to get a buildup, we're going to get an imbalance, and then we're going to go into clench mode, because if things are positioned where they should be, we're relaxed. As soon as we start tipping forward, now gravity is going to be drawing the mandible away and twisting it, and then we contract to try to stop it from falling away. So there's all these unconscious contractions and buildup of adhesions that are occurring in our patterning, based on these continual forces that we don't even recognize, until suddenly there's a limitation or a pain.

Speaker 1: 36:21

And it's interesting because about maybe eight months ago I all of a sudden developed shoulder pain, left shoulder. So as a dentist, I'm right-handed too and I'm like this all day long and I didn't injure myself nothing. But I've been a dentist for 20 years now and I'm like this is I've got like left shoulder, right hip, which are intimately connected. And you know what I'm doing Sometimes I'm standing, sometimes I'm sitting. Also, I'm so short too, I'm always contorted and trying to see in the mouth. It's really interesting and it's not that, like I said, it's not that I injured myself, but 20 years habit and pulling that fascia. And it's interesting because I've had massages every month for years and I've recently been doing the fascia work because it's different than a massage. But I think in my line of work I think I could have that work like three, four times a week. Still still, because you're right, every time we move, talk, anything we're doing, we're always manipulating that fascia.

Speaker 2: 37:17

So I wonder if I can show this, can you see this? Yep, oh my God, a different face, huge. And here's the exciting thing this before and after was three weeks. All she did was work between the toes.

Speaker 1: 37:35

She did not. So those of you who are listening. So Deanna just showed a photo of a woman. She had big double chin, basically Right, he didn't see like any neck whatsoever and like her whole face looked completely different. She has a nice chin. She looked healthier, more vibrant, yet her eyes, like her full head, is more forward. Wow, that's really amazing. Funny that you say that because I've wanted to remind this.

Speaker 1: 38:00

I, when you were, I think you talked about this on kelly with her podcast, and I mentioned that to my cT because my daughter, my 15-year-old, very pigeon-toed, like her left foot, we were on vacation. My husband was like oh my gosh. And she said everybody at school tells me that too. And I said and then you were talking about putting your hands between the toes right for a few minutes and I said, all right, I'm never going to get my 15-year-old to put her hands in. Well, I said I wonder if I could use those little things that you separate your toes to paint their nose. We had those. So I had her put that between her toes for three minutes, then had her walk around and three minutes she was even sold. She was like, oh my gosh, no more pigeon toes. I was like so. Then my CFT was like oh, I've never told you about Zentos, so I got her a pair of those. But yeah, please tell us about the Toa line.

Speaker 2: 38:49

Yeah, it's wild to think, but we've got these feet that have 26 bones in each, malleable under different surfaces, is because there's all these bones and all this space where they end up turning into kind of clubs. For a lot of people they become really bound and hard. We don't consider like all of your body weight is being carried on these little feet and most people just, oh, let's go get a pedicure. You don't really think about the health of the feet. Death starts in the feet. The feet are the very furthest thing from your engine, so they're the first things that are going to start to suffer from a lack of flow.

Speaker 2: 39:32

And then, depending on our patterning when I'm looking at a body I always look there's always going to be one side of your body that's the driver, like having a flat tire.

Speaker 2: 39:40

You're driving with a flat tire, the car starts getting pulled into that system and then the other side of the body becomes the anchor. So here's where we have the pain. So your left shoulder, your right foot, is going to be the driver and as it's driving away now that left side is anchoring and getting really tight and tense to try to stop this continual force. So now these muscles in the back of the body which aren't designed to be holding you up, are having to do this extra job and then eventually we've got shoulder pain or because of the alignment and how that affects the humerus and the shoulder socket. Now there's limitation and range of motion and if we don't address that opposite foot we're going to have again. If you go for a treatment, it might be still good for a couple of days or get some improvement, but you're not getting to the root of the problem, which is that other foot pulling away.

Speaker 1: 40:32

That's the really sad part. I have bunions. I've had that, so I've always had foot problems. I used to always have right knee. I never really pained when I was younger, but always snapping and popping in that knee knee I've always had, and the bottom of my right foot, the middle of it, and it's been numb for 30 years probably again yeah so when your toes are twisted and held in that patterning.

Speaker 2: 40:54

Every step you take it reinforces that patterning.

Speaker 2: 40:57

When we actually take that time and we put pressure between the spaces and it works great for the hands too. And for the hands we can be a little more efficient than we can do both hands at one time, because again, if you even took your finger and you started to pull and turn it, that's going to pull everything up the system. So now if you've got a tension in your shoulder and you're only working here, we haven't addressed the hand to bring that back to balance. That's going to be part of the equation as well. So your fingers and your toes are the very furthest thing and they're going to be the strongest manipulators of your fascia patterning. So when all she did was spend three minutes every day between each toe and she was able to bring her center of gravity back more to her yield, bring more balance and symmetry, bring more energy down to the feet, because now you're heating at the most frozen place and so you're creating more of a flow in the body. And what struck me the most were her eyes, though.

Speaker 1: 41:52

Yeah, she just looks healthier, more vibrant. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 41:57

That's so fascinating and so it's like this she was Right. So that's fascinating. So doing this were in only three weeks on getting those toes more aligned, the entire her whole structure chain. That's because it almost looks like she and everybody. You can watch this on youtube, but it almost looks like she must have lost 20 pounds or something, but no, when you just I thought it was really interesting to use. We're talking about how the proper diaphragmatic breathing that's important for weight loss, like you said. So many of us who try so hard but we can't seem to get that belly fat reduced, maybe we need to really look towards that diaphragm and that proper breathing.

Speaker 2: 42:39

And it's funny because people don't really consider the mechanics of what's happening inside, because in my view, this is the most important thing. So again, here's this plate of muscle when it's moving up and down. I've got my abdominal organs, I've got my heart and lungs. This massaging is giving energy to those organs. Now, if I have a weak diaphragm, because I'm an upper chest breather, now the weight of everything above crashing down into the core space. So if I'm leaning more to the left, here's my aorta that's basically getting compressed, so it's like you're taking the straw and twisting it. So now your heart has to work that much harder to send blood and oxygen through there, because there's no energy there. Now it's also colder. So now the fats that would normally be liquid when heated, they're becoming solid. These plaques are getting aligned along the blood vessels, they're clogging the liver. Without that action, your pancreas, how can you possibly have all of this wonderful insulin being created to balance blood sugar when you're basically putting all of the weight of everything above and you're strangling these organs and now you're not giving them proper energy? Because you're basically putting all of the weight of everything above and you're strangling these organs and now you're not giving them proper energy, because you're not breathing from that space. Like when we're digesting food, part of the digestion is from the mechanical aspect of this muscle moving up and down to create heat and energy. So if I'm this right-handed person and I'm sitting like this and I'm eating, and then most people aren't chewing properly, so now I'm swallowing whole pieces of food and I'm putting it into this gut, this stomach organ that also doesn't have enough energy because I'm not breathing right, how can it possibly break down properly and absorb nutrients? And that's where we're starting to see issues with bloating.

Speaker 2: 44:23

So as we get older, we tend to think okay, I haven't changed my diet, I'm still exercising it. Now I'm getting this little pouch, this extra belly fat, but it's not that, it's compression, ballooning. And now, because there's not enough energy for foods to break down or be eliminated, we're getting a backup of waste that's taking space, causing us to become bigger. Now the body's inflaming because it's going nothing working right in here. So you're getting a whole a bunch of inflammation in the gut, making us bigger and it's bad. Now we're attracting parasite and bacteria and fungus and getting an imbalance of what we should have and they're creating waste, causing even more.

Speaker 2: 45:00

So this is really, in my view, what's going on from the perspective of weight loss, because I was that person dieting and working out and I'm getting bigger, so why were the rules of weight loss not applying to me and not how I really started to understand what was going on with the breath and with the alignment? If I stood up right now and I turned my back to you and I fell in from my back, I'll look 20 pounds bigger than when I'm standing correctly and I've got things positioned where they should be. But really so from the weight loss conversation, I see this as more of a size loss space gain conversation than weight loss. What we're really losing is the toxins.

Speaker 1: 45:36

Yeah, it's fascinating. I love learning this stuff and it makes complete sense. And again, when the tool you have is your breath, that's exciting, that's empowering. We can do this. I definitely want to talk about your block there, but right before we do that, we're coming to the end here. Let's say we have all this, the TMJ, pain and stuff. As somebody who understands fascia, teach me as the dentist how do I want to approach this, what am I looking for and maybe what are other diagnostic solutions that I can come?

Speaker 2: 46:09

Even giving people just the understanding of how to create a little bit of a release in the rib cage. So we've got all these free videos that we teach people using a rolled up towel. If you're just using a rolled up towel everybody's got a towel at home and you lie on that towel, right on the belly button and you breathe. Now you are bringing the diaphragm into the equation. You're going to be strengthening this, so it's going to help to lift. As soon as that rib cage lifts and pulls back. Now everything here changes. So it's all about alignment. And then if we release those lower ribs and we even lift even further and then we understand how to teach people about that proper alignment with the hand, that all changes the entire. We should have 60% of our body weight on our heels and I learned this over 20 years ago, so it's probably far more now. The average person has 80% of their body weight on the balls of their feet and that's before a high heel shoe. So what that we need to consider when dealing with this, because if we keep this happening, we're going to keep contracted. So the more we can teach how to bring that rib cage up, bring those arms back into alignment, then this gets to rest and then we're not in that clenching mode.

Speaker 2: 47:24

And then teaching people how to position the tongue and strengthen the tongue. Hold the tongue out for 10 breaths, you'll feel it. It's a muscle, right. But? And I'll teach people like look up, bring that tongue toward the ceiling. You're gonna feel where these adhesions are in the throat. But the more you strengthen it then the stronger it is. To also help support proper alignment of the head and the neck. But we can't just focus on the tongue, because it comes from the rib cage and the rib cage is driven from the feet and the legs. So it's not like a simple thing, right?

Speaker 1: 48:00

I've done that before, just throwing a guard, and these people try to balance it back. I'm going to be talking about their feet, about their breasts, that's it, because all of these are totally free. You don't have to buy anything. You can do all of this at home, so that's absolutely amazing. So, talking about that, you have an amazing website. You have so many programs. Tell us what your website. Tell us a little bit about it. You've created this block which you showed earlier, and it's wooden because that's more similar to bone, right? Yeah, a couple of sizes. So you already mentioned that you don't want to get the block right away, even just using a towel. But tell us your website. Tell us all. You have so many programs. It's absolutely amazing.

Speaker 2: 48:41

So website is blocktherapycom and where we basically want people to start. If you're wanting to dive in and get the tools is our starter program. So this is what the BlockBuddy looks like. It's a very specific size and shape. It's rounded Because as we're going through the layers of fascia to address those adhesions all the way to the bone.

Speaker 2: 49:02

The reason it's made of wood is because bone and wood are similar in density. If we use something more porous, like a tennis ball or a fascia roller that's made of plastic and they're porous, you'll get some surface layer benefit, but you're not. We're not going to be able to drive through those layers to the bone and we also don't move on the surface. When we do positions and we do positions all the way everywhere, from head to toe. When we do positions and we do positions all the way everywhere, from head to toe, front and back and side, we're in a position for a minimum of three minutes as we're focused on the breath. So we teach you how to connect your diaphragmatic breaths Now we've turned on the body's furnace and then we teach you how to be in position and search for pain, because pain is the baby crying. It's connected to where those adhesions are. So we can use pain as our roadmap and we twist and we turn. Energy moves in waves and spirals. So we don't just again, we don't age linearly, we age in a rotational forward direction. So as we start going through the layers, we start shearing away. Very slowly You're following that path of pain, but you're in control and the pressure fibers are larger than the pain fibers. So as soon as you connect in and you start breathing, those pressure fibers take over. So now it becomes a good pain and then, before you know it, wow, I don't feel pain anymore. Okay, now search, now start shearing into a new layer, a new level, and we'll take a little time, a few breaths, and we'll melt those adhesions and we'll keep going deeper because we want to get to the root of the issue, at the bone. So that's two parts of our three-part process of block therapy or fascia decompression. The first one is to create the space that we've lost over time through melting those adhesions, which is tied into the second pillar, which is inflating the space through proper diaphragmatic breathing. And then the third one is maintaining that space through understanding proper postural foundation. So if I have pain in my left shoulder, my right foot's going to be likely the driver. There's always exceptions to the rule, but most likely this is going to be the driver.

Speaker 2: 51:02

So, bringing your feet back into balance, releasing the toes as a strengthening, gripping the toes into the floor because we want to rebuild that. The feet should be springy, but because people don't think about it, they've pancaked, they've flattened out and they don't have a lot of life in them. So we're not walking with intention. We want to bring that life and awareness back into the feet. We should be walking with our toes. People are walking on these clubs and letting gravity direct their movement as opposed to being conscious of how we're moving.

Speaker 2: 51:33

This is really all about just becoming giving yourself a little bit of time. It might sound complicated, but it's super simple. It's just the discipline of saying I'm not only going to be living in my brain, I'm going to be living partly in my body. I'm going to connect to these sensations. I'm not going to be afraid of pain, because it's the baby crying.

Speaker 2: 51:51

If we mask the pain, then we're not listening to the signal and your cell is saying hey, mom or dad, you're asking me to do a phenomenal job for you, but you're starving me, or I'm dehydrated, or I'm exhausted or I'm dirty, and that comes from a lack of flow. So your cells let you know when they're unhappy, because they're trying to do a phenomenal job for you. But if they don't have what they need, which is space, because we're collapsed and we're pushing them, they're going to start talking to you, and if we keep masking it, they're going to talk louder and louder until they're so far away you don't even hear them anymore. And that's when things can get scarier, because now we're in a huge state of dis-ease where we have so many of our cells not being part of the equation, and now we're having to slug those cells along instead of having them be nice and buoyant and light. That's what this process does.

Speaker 1: 52:43

It's like us. I'm going to sign up right away. I got to get myself done because I need to do it every day. That is great. We're going to. I'm going to call you and tell you hey, my left shoulder is finally totally healed. It's been great. So I'll tell you exactly what to do.

Speaker 1: 52:59

Awesome. I so appreciate you coming on. I know we could talk for many more hours and I know this won't be the last time that we talk, because I'm really excited about bringing some of this stuff for my patients to really get you know, real release and instead of these band-aids, I'm always looking at what is the root. What is the root, what is the root and always how the body's totally interconnected right so we can make such an impact on the mouth by remembering that we're one body, and so this is really exciting. Again, that website, guys, is blocktherapycom. There are so many amazing different programs that she has. Please take a look. And again, thank you so much and everybody, I hope you have a wonderful day. Go get your block, or even a towel, and start learning to move that fascia so we can all look younger, be more flexible and have really great lives. Don't forget to breathe. Take care everybody. See you next time.