Understanding the Vagal Nerve with Melanie Weller

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me. Today I get to introduce you to Melanie Weller, who is a medical visionary, to help us decode stress and understand how the vagal nerve is involved and how by understanding the vagal nerve, we can shift the way the stress affects us. Thank you so much for joining me, Melanie. Thank you for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

So first, just tell us a little more about you. Like, how did you even find yourself in this realm of decoding stress?

Well, I've been a physical therapist for about 25 years, and I was an athletic trainer before I went to physical therapy school. So I've been working with people before or have my hands on people's bodies for the better part of 30 years for healing purposes. And.

Very early in my physical therapy career, I ended up at a clinic that specialized in treating people that had not responded to multiple other interventions.

Okay. And you had to kind of think outside the box.

You're like, very much outside of the box. So I got kicked out of the box every single day for years.

Okay.

Because these people had seen.

Multiple physical therapists, chiropractors sometimes had multiple surgeries. They had been around the block.

Many, many, many times. And I will say, even backing that up, I had an incredible foundation for how to approach this from my physical therapy education at the University of Southern California, which I've really been grateful for every single day. I was there at a very unique time when they were transitioning from their master's program to their doctorate of physical therapy program and just had an amazing set of faculty there at the time that were all about thinking outside of.

The box and so play together. You all got to like, say, let's figure this out.

Yes. And I think I just fundamentally never really outgrew my inner 3 or 4 year old that just wants to know why all the time.

So.

So what did you. How did you start to figure it out? What is. What were.

Some of the.

Led you down this path?

Well, I mean, I think one of the biggest things was just looking at a person as a whole body and really seeing how things could connect. So, like, one of the things that I. That took a number of repetitions for me to really fully integrate when I was getting mentored by this much more experienced therapist that was seeing a lot of these complicated patients as well. You know, somebody would come in with knee pain and they weren't getting better. And, you know, and I had cleared the hip and the ankle and was just, you know, trying to figure this out. And he would say, well, did you look at their thoracolumbar junction? You know, and I'd be like, no, I didn't do that.

And so we would. But you really, like. As you got further and further away from the pain site, evaluating people, you realized how much their dysfunction was systemic. It was not isolated to the part that they were having pain, where they were having pain. And often the part that they were having pain was the least dysfunctional part of their body. Biomechanically, it was just the part that was taking a beating for everything that was not happening right above and below it. And so these people had really lost shock absorption on a systemic level.

That makes sense to me. Not in physical shock absorption, but maybe also psycho emotional shock.

Absolutely. They are intimately tied together. When you lose one, you lose the other, for sure.

It was so funny. Recently, I do a lot of testing patients for their neurotransmitter levels, urine testing, and a lot of times I find that the GABA levels are too low. And I think of GABA as a shock absorber neurotransmitter. And I say this often to patients when I say if I see their GABA's low, I say, it's like, you don't have shocks in the car. You're going to heal every bump along the way. And this patient was so cute. She said, actually, I just took my car in to get new shocks.

So sometimes it shows up in our.

It really does. It really does. And that's really where I got into what these. The underpinnings, the stress and spiritual related underpinnings of the physical dysfunction were. Because what I heard in listening to these people is that what was happening inside of their bodies was metaphorically playing out in their personal and professional lives.

Something. Wow.

The first book I read that really gave me a big aha on this was Caroline Mace's Anatomy of the Spirit.

Yeah. Such a good book.

And when I read that, I was like, oh, they're all like, this is like, now I understand what's happening here. I knew there was something, there was a pattern that was happening, but I didn't have a framework for it. And so, like those knee patients, I would often ask, like, well, tell me about your relationship with your tribe. Because that's one of the things she says is like a first shocker, like lower half of the body.

Issue. And.

Through some continuing education courses that I took, I took some at Michigan State University's College of Osteopathic Medicine, and I took some through some private companies as well. One of the things that I learned, a technique I really loved, was how to decompress the vagus nerve at the base of the skull. I did a couple of different craniosacral.

Trainings.

Yeah, And I've done those, too. When I was in naturopathic medical school, I trained in craniosacral therapy. So I know what you mean. And craniosacral therapy, for anyone who's not familiar. I mean, it's a very gentle, I suppose I would say hands on touch therapy, but it's about perceiving movement of the cerebral spinal fluid, which we don't. Usually, we don't really perceive when we're just sitting here. But with craniosacral therapy, you learn to feel the movement of the fluid through the spine, up and down the vertebral column, and you can feel when there's a restriction or blockage and be able to, through touch, shift those, release the restrictions and shift the blockages so that the movement is restored.

Yes. And it is such a powerful intervention.

And I'll just say as an aside right here, because it's my favorite fact about our cranial rhythmic impulses, or craniosacral rhythms, whatever, you know, depending on where you come from, you might call it something different, but they go on for about 20 minutes, sometimes more, after our hearts and brains stop when we die, really. And so it's such a primal pulse. And to think about how much momentum must be in the system for it to go on 20 minutes after our heart and brain activity cease.

It really is. It's like a pendulum that's still swinging. It's just.

Yes, yes.

One of the techniques that I acquired through this training was decompressing the vagus nerve at the base of the skull. It was just a great technique to unstick anything that was stuck. It didn't matter where it was in the body. If I had an ankle person that wasn't getting better, I decompress the vagus nerve at the base of their skull. If I had a knee patient that wasn't getting better, I decompress the vagus nerve at the base of the skull, and it always made everything better.

So stop for just a second. Let's explain the vagal nerve for anyone who's not totally familiar with it. Sure.

So the vagus nerve, it's your 10th cranial nerve, which means it comes out of your brainstem. We have 12 cranial nerves, and it's the biggest component of your parasympathetic nervous system. So it balances out your fight and flight responses. It is your pleasure pathway. It mediates inflammation, it gives you grace under pressure. It innervates your vocal cords, your heart and your diaphragm. Or not your diaphragm, vocal cords, heart and digestive system.

And it sends lots of information to your brain from almost all of your organs.

So it's like a, this is the thing I always think is so cool is that it's a two way street. We usually think of nerves as like coming from the brain down. And of course our nerves, say from our fingers will tell our brain when there's pain, but it's with the vagal nerve, it's, it's, it's the thing that creates that what we call the, the gut brain connection or the. Why we think of the gut as a second brain is because of this constant communication. Communication back.

Absolutely, absolutely. And we also have more connections going from our hearts up to our brain than we do from our brains down to our heart. So your vagus nerve is really your gut brain. It's your heart brain, you know, and you're all in one. And your brain, brain is just taking it in, you know, it's like, you know, and giving a different output but when.

When you can. So my clinical expertise that I've worked with for a long time is in treating the vagus nerve as a pinched nerve at multiple points in the body. And when you do that, you give the brain better input from your body and so then your brain can give you better output.

Because otherwise if there's like a, like a restriction or a block, it's like a traffic jam in the signal.

Not really getting the right signal from your body and is not able to send out the right signal.

Yes, well, and here's the thing. That our conscious parts of our brain, our verbal aspects of our brain operate at about 40 bits per second. Our non verbal.

Parts of our brain and our bodies Transmit information at 11 million bits per second.

Whoa.

So you really get on this neurological superhighway when you start to open things up and that's it. You know, I, it has been such a, it continues to be such a privilege to treat people that haven't had success and suddenly and see massive changes every visit or to get them better in, or so much better in one visit that they're angry because they can't. They didn't think it should have been that easy.

Wow. Yeah. But you're almost like, why didn't I find you sooner?

Exactly. Yeah, no, I get a lot of that. You Know, like, you know, it used to be like, why didn't I find you sooner? And why.

You know, why was this so easy? Now it's like, why aren't you teaching everybody how to do this?

Which is why we're doing this. Yeah. Because I'm definitely branching out into the, into the teaching aspect and beyond the. Well, so I'll just staying with the structural a little bit longer. So we know that stress and trauma always affect the voice and the breath.

And we experience stress and trauma that way. You know, we.

Lose our breath. We say it in our language like it took my breath away or it, you know, when something. Or knocked my breath out. You know, when, when we had a trauma and we scream or we can't scream.

Mm.

And our vocal cords and our diaphragms are horizontally oriented in our bodies.

Mm. Okay. I'm with you.

Okay. So. And like, so are our pelvic floors. And then in extreme stress, some people might even lose bladder control or bowel control as well. And so we embody stress and trauma on the transverse plane, on the horizontal in our bodies.

Nobody gets stressed or traumatized and sachets down the hall with really great arm swing.

Right. Right.

We all lock up and stop. Rotation is the first thing we give up.

I will say it's the last thing we typically get back if we do.

In my evaluation procedure, when I go through.

My series of biomechanical tests, they heavily look at rotation in the body, but.

At a fine tuning way. Something that takes a skilled.

Eye and skilled set of hands to really evaluate. I do work with people online and guide them through doing it themselves, but it's much trickier. You have to know what you're doing because we're all masters of compensation with movement, and we will all take the path of least resistance.

Hard to really sort of see beyond all of the. The adjustments and modifications and see.

Yes.

What's really going on here.

Right, Exactly. And. But the more severe that somebody is limited in their systemic rotation.

I will say the more severe their mental health situation is. For sure.

He's a connection.

Absolutely. And I've. I'm looking for somebody to partner with to help research this or to piggyback on somebody's mental health research, because I know when somebody has minimal rotation systemically to ask them if they're in suicide ideation or suicide planning, because the answer has always been yes. And I've been able to treat a couple of people with acute onsets of hallucinations, and they are severely locked up in that way. As well. And one of them was literally planning to kill himself. If what I did with him didn't work, and I didn't. I. It was just like the universe brought him to me in a way that is like the universe conspired for both of us that day for sure. Because that's not something that is really treating that kind of a patient. It's not really in my wheelhouse. Or was it, you know, like that? Yeah. And.

At the end of our, you know, this is somebody who was. Couldn't make eye contact with anyone because their faces were melting.

And we had a. We have had a mutual friend and she just called me and said, my friend really needs to see you. Is there any way you can see him today? And it worked out.

And at the end of our session, 90% of his hallucinations were gone.

Isn't that something?

You know, and he texted me later that night and he said, melanie, you saved my life. And not in the cute kind of way. Like, I mean, he was really just had that massive of a shift in his consciousness around himself. And fundamentally that's really, I think, what the vagus nerve gives us access to is.

This bigger consciousness about our own, own value and potential. And.

You know, I love using it in that way to, you know, sort of as the, you know, to find your own inner magic.

Well, and, and I, and I love how you're, you know, we talked about how the vagus nerve does so much in our bodies, but what you're also really pointing out is because it has so many interconnections in our bodies, when there's a. When stress and trauma has kind of jammed up the vagal nerve in some way, of course it's going to, it's going to signal to us, it's going to show it to us in multiple ways. So it's going to show. It may show it to us on physical symptoms like pain, or it might show it to us on emotional symptoms or, you know, so there's so many ways it can show up. And we usually are looking at our bodies so separately, like, we usually are looking at psycho emotional issues in this own compartment over here. We're not realizing, oh, this is. This is connected to what's happening in the physical body. But of course, it's all interconnected. Our mind and body are so interconnected, we. You really can't separate them.

Absolutely. I would say your body is your mind, you know, like that. And that when you want to, you know, when people talk about mindset techniques to me and I Totally understand. Like, and you know, in the research and like the, they work. But when you've really changed your mindset, you've changed your body set.

Amazing. I love that. I just want people to hear that. Like, just let it soak in. Like, just soak in that your, your mind body is one. It's can't separate them. And to the degree that we try to separate it, we're. We're sep. We're separate from ourselves. We're not really understanding ourselves.

Yes, yes. And healing fundamentally requires. Or when people heal.

And I'll say, you know, and I'll maybe caveat this a little bit with like really healing completely where you move, you know, especially far past your, your situation.

It. People that do that have major shifts in their consciousness. And I think like Anita Moorjani's story is very reflective of, of this, you know, and.

I believe her book is called Dying to Be Me. And she's got a great TED Talk if anyone wants to check that out.

Wow.

And she was on her deathbed. Her family had been called in to say goodbye to her. She had lymphoma, I believe, and.

She had this out of body experience and this ability to see like the entire world. Like she saw her brother flying in on the airplane and she just had this massive, you know, stepped out into this bigger consciousness and she woke up and in like three weeks, she didn't have any tumors.

Isn't that something?

And so it was in part of what I've been, you know, you know, in all honesty, like, I've really just, you know, I continually connect the dots, but you know, I've really recently just connected the dots at this whole new level. And one of the things that I've always wondered is like, how do I give people that experience without having to have to be on their deathbeds? Like, how do we access that? Because I believe we all have access to that kind of transformational potential.

I agree with you. I completely agree with you and I. And, and, and yeah, how to, how to. Because sometimes it's like maybe when we're pushed to that limit or is there something that actually happens inside our bodies when we're at the brink of death is somehow the signals start allowing for or this greater perspective where all of a sudden we realize we have this ability to shift things, you know, we.

Probably haven't all along, right? Exactly. It's like, yeah, I agree. We have it all along and we don't have to just rely on, you know, I mean, near death experiences are extraordinary. But how do we bring that awareness and some of the miracles that come with that back to the rest of us so we don't have to go to that extreme of a situation to learn that, how to do that.

And I think it sounds like you're already doing. You're trying to, like, tell us more about this storytelling, because I think that must be some of how you do that now.

Yes, yes. So I talk a lot about the vagus bridge, the vagus nerve as the bridge between our stories and our bodies. And this shows up quite.

You can put this in the literature too, that when your story is stress and trauma, your vagus nerve does not function as well. And when your story is gratitude and appreciation and beauty and pleasure, your vagus nerve functions better.

It's like it's listening to what you're thinking and saying.

It's totally listening well, and it's the pathway for those things. When it. When you're. When you're grateful, you're exercising your vagus nerve. When you're experiencing pleasure, you're exercising your vagus nerve. And women. The vagus nerve innervates the cervix.

And there's research that shows that women with complete spinal cord injuries can have orgasms with vagus nerve stimulation at the cervix.

Wow. And of course, the vagus nerve, as you were saying, innervates the heart, and then the heart releases oxytocin, which is. We think of as our bonding hormone, but I've now been calling it the love hormone.

Absolutely.

Feeling love and gratitude. It's the heart releasing oxytocin. Yes.

Yeah. Love and trust, I will say as well. And in the business research, they talk a lot about. When they talk about trust within organizations, they'll reference oxytocin.

For that as well.

And so when you say story, you mean you're kind of thinking of, say if you ask the person, how are they or what is their life or what's going on for them? If. If they're sort of. What they're expressing in their experience of themselves in their life is that of gratitude and love and trust. And then we know the vagal nervous flowing. Is that what you tell me? Tell me. Sure.

Right. Well, I will say. So the way that it started to. Well, I will say I think a lot of these idioms exist in our language that, oh, they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders or they just keep tripping over their lives.

Gotcha.

You know, that like, they just can't stomach real life. You know, like we have these Idioms.

In our person might even be saying this idiom without really realizing how deep it goes.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And.

And what I have come to really discover in this process is really how.

Precisely and prescriptively story lives in the body. And so if we're like, just to think about storytelling in the broadest of terms, the hero's journey is a very common thing. People use it to structure books and our movies. And so we all understand the hero's journey, and we can easily equate our head with our hero, you know, because that's how we think, how we show up, what we, you know, leadership, what we're leading with.

And when somebody is being the hero in someone else's story at the expense of their own, they are more likely to have something show up in their head and neck area dysfunctionally than maybe in another body part. Now, we're all very clever about how we put together the puzzle, but broadly speaking, you know, there's, you know, so really talking about a client's just their hero's journey, particularly with someone that has a head and neck issue, can be super, super powerful.

Wow. Wow.

And in the midst of my own midlife crisis slash spiritual awakening, I ended up.

When I was in my early 40s. I really.

My body was falling apart. My blood pressure was really high, and I thought I was taking care of myself. I had plantar fasciitis that was keeping me from running, which was my primary form of exercise at the time.

Who had felt like all these different.

Things were these, like, Right. I was starting to fall apart, you know, and my marriage was bumpy at the time, you know, was struggling at a level that it had not previously, you know, I had not previously experienced. And I had a professional lawsuit brought against me.

And so really, every aspect of my life was. Yeah, it was like, all right, well, what am I supposed to do? And I. Because with my foot problems, I. What I had been asking myself is, okay, well, what's. Clearly, there's a path and purpose issue here.

Yes. You know, interesting. Painful to stand up and walk.

Yeah. And I very much had a business multiple personality disorder because I have a string of professional credentials that I've collected over the years, you know, and part of my own journey is learning that I don't need all of this external validation that I'm, you know, good enough as it is. But I spent a lot of time collecting that. Collecting those letters after my name. And.

I have really strong intuitive skills, you know, these soft skills. And so in figuring out how to show up with those, has been with both of those at the same time, has really been at the center of my personal journey. And like when I. For the client that was having the hallucinations and was planning his suicide, I brought all of myself to the table that day. I did all of my clinical skills stuff with him, but I gave him an amazing.

Psychic reading and I gave him an amazing mediumship reading that even impressed. I was like, I didn't know, you know, where the accuracy with it was.

We allow ourselves to be more ourselves.

Absolutely right, Right, exactly. I didn't parcel, I didn't part parse myself out into pieces. You know, I brought all of myself to the table and a miracle happened. And I hear this all the time because I treat a lot of medical professionals and they'll talk to me about their intuitive.

Skills, but they won't. They don't feel like they can talk to their peers, you know, their colleagues about it for fear of being ridiculed. But they're surgeons that always get all the cancer and have amazing.

Outcomes. You know, like they're exceptional at what they do because they know how to show up fully with their work.

Right. And they probably, they've developed this ability to perceive what's going on and what the person needs and how to communicate with the person and it. Yeah, it just.

Absolutely right. And I think they're very good at getting themselves into a flow state really, you know, which is a vagal state as well and you know, or a high vagal function state as well.

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So one of the things in the midst of all of my own falling apart that I did was to Study astrology to learn more about myself. And.

I. And I did some reading as well. And when I. When in the reading, I learned that mythology was a mode of communicating scientific information. So for. Yeah, so for example, in the ancient, ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris are numbers of the Earth's processional cycle.

Wow.

And they just communicated it in a story versus in, you know, the way we do now, like in a journal.

Yeah. I love that it's coming back to the story again.

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, and it's brilliant because with story, we remember 70% more, 80% longer. The neuroscience of story is extraordinary. And medicine is really missing out on this amazing opportunity to integrate story. And even as we're in the midst of the. Or we're at least trying to get out of the coronavirus pandemic in the throes of a delta variant surge right now, and everybody keeps giving the statistics to incentivize people to get the vaccine. The statistics don't motivate people. Story motivates people.

Yeah.

And so we have this really amazing opportunity to.

Integrate story. And my first thought after reading this about the myth of Isis and Osiris was probably a thought that only a physical therapist or occupational therapist would have. But it's. Well, what in the body is 23 and a half degrees from the midline? Because the Earth right now is at about a 23 and a half degree tilt.

Interesting. That is a cool thought.

And I pulled out my anatomy books and in all of. And I pulled out my protractor and in all of my anatomy books, and I've had a chance to look at real skulls since where the vagus nerve exits, the base of the skull is 23 and a half degrees from the center of where the spinal cord exits.

Oh, my gosh. You give me goosebumps. Basically, we, like, we. The. The earth tilt is reflected in us totally.

Our bodies mimic the cosmos. And that's really the exciting. Or I mean, it's all exciting, but the. That's the. That's the bigger consciousness.

Shift. Or that's the opposite. The opportunity for a bigger consciousness shift really lies in that. And I know just from my professional training, you know, like, I instantly connected all sorts of dots because.

In PT school, we learned that textbook normal rotation between your C1 and C2, your first and second cervical vertebrae is 47 degrees to each side. And there's also 47 degrees between the pole stars that our Earth points towards over thousands of years. And normal rotation at the foot is 23 degrees, and anterior cruciate ligament sits at an average 47 degree angle of inclination in the knee. If you just take the number of conditions.

That.

Pts and chiropractors and osteopathic doctors would associate. Just take the anterior cruciate ligament relative to knee problems and upper cervical relative to headaches and dizziness and neck pain. That's a gigantic chunk of people.

Yes, it is.

That See medical professionals and most common, probably pain sites. Absolutely, absolutely. And so alignment is not just something that happens within your body. It's something. It's a relationship between you and the bigger picture. And there's research that shows that when solar and space weather disrupt the electromagnetic field of the earth, it's measurable in our vagus nerves.

Oh my gosh.

And the extent to which it's measurable depends on the strength of our interpersonal connections.

It's like our. How much we're interconnected with the world and the people around us determines how much it's going to show up, of course, how much the signal is going to be showing.

So you think about like our loneliness epidemic that we have that, you know, people that are lonely get blown about by those disruptions.

More so. And it really then also gives a mechanism for how astrological cosmological alignment affects our bodies as well.

And so beyond the angular relationships.

I have a favorite picture from a set of anatomy books that I got for shortly after I graduated from PT school for some continuing education courses I was taking. And one of the images in there is a compilation of MRI scans that gives you a 3D picture of what the ventricles of the brain look like. And the ventricles going back to our cranial sacral discussion make cerebral spinal fluid so cool.

That must be such cool book of images then to be able to.

It is. Well, it's a Sabota anatomy book. It's a standard.

You know, it's the German version of Netters or whatever grays like that we all had basically. And when I had done an online stress management class and I opened up the book because I thought, oh, I ended up. And so in the class I ended up talking a lot about the ventricles of the brain. And I thought, oh, I'll just snap a picture and put it on my social media. But I had not opened the book for as many times as I have opened that book to that exact page to show patients. I had not opened it since I started studying astrology. And when I opened it, the image looks exactly like the ram's horns that represent Aries.

I Can totally see what you mean. Yes, of course.

And in astrology, Aries rules the head.

And so then I was like, oh, where's the rest of it? And it works the whole way through the body. The way our hyoid bones and our throat sit on top of the larynx looks just like the symbol for Taurus. And Taurus rules the throat. And our aortic arches are the same shape as the symbol for Leo. And Leo rules thigh, heart. Libra's symbol is a set of scales. And Libra rules the kidneys. You know, and scales are also justice.

And the populations, at least in the United States, with the highest levels of social injustice also have the highest levels of kidney disease.

Really? Oh, my gosh.

And so we embody social injustice at the level of the kidneys.

And this not only works with.

Western astrology.

It works with the Vedas.

Several years after I had been working with this for a long time, I found a book written by an MD, PhD that talks about how the Vedas describe our anatomy and how our cerebellum and brain stems look like the Hindu deity Ganesh.

And how the.

Even at the cellular level that a molecule of ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is the energy source in our cells, is the same shape as the Aries constellation.

And you can pick out, like, even the sphenoid bone in the skull which sits behind our eyes. It looks very much like an owl.

And, you know, and we talk about our wisdom and, you know, owls in terms of that, you know, being able to see things. It. That bone follows the biblical description of the Ark of the Covenant. And really, that whole story of the. The temple of the Ark of the Covenant describes cranial anatomy in quite a bit of detail.

Athena was born of Zeus's head, and Athena's symbol was the owl. And she was born of Zeus's head because Zeus ate her mother. So people that have. When somebody comes to me with headaches, especially, you know, when there hasn't been a concussion and, you know, or, you know, a direct trauma kind of thing. And.

I will.

When people come to me with a.

Like a sphenoid, like, pain in their temples, say, I will ask them where their power imbalance relationships are or where relationships in the. In their. What relationships in their life have high power imbalances. Like perhaps their parents had a very unequal relationship where you could metaphorically say one ate the other.

I see.

And that stress will show up in the cenoid bone, the head.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. And so you can really.

Use this to decode that. So, like, when you're heroics like that. Aries, which is also Mars the warrior, you know, in your head, when you're being the hero in someone else's story at the expense of your own, or in your throat, which is Venus, and desires, what we love. When you're satisfying everybody else's desires at the expense of your own.

That'S going to show up as a head and neck issue. And so it's just a really helpful way to kind of logic yourself into.

You know, gets you sort of a clinical approach to really see where the stress is in their body. And of course, you know, I combine this with my physical examination as well.

And I've created a form of energy medicine out of this.

So that, you know, and it's so fascinating because I've used metaphor so much, you know, even through my. The course of my career, even before this.

And the.

You know, and I would always even like, reflect it back. Like, one of my most memorable moments was a woman told me that she just felt like a sponge and couldn't be wrung out.

And I. And so we did our session, and at the end, I. She had a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. So her story, or her perception, was that she couldn't rotate. She couldn't wring herself out. She couldn't rotate because that was going to exacerbate her pain. And so I literally. I had her sit in a chair. I just intuitively picked which direction we were going to go. And I had her hold a rubber band that was pulling in a rotational.

Direction from her, basically.

Yeah. But she was in neutral. So I gave her the story that I told her. I said, I'm ringing. This is to ring you out. This is what we're going to do, to ring you out.

And.

And it was mind blowing how much better she was afterwards. It was just.

Extraordinary, you know, and so I. But I'm a huge fan of treating the metaphor, whatever that is, or. And reflecting that language back to the individual, because then they know you're connecting with the story, whether I'm pulling the ice pick out or, you know, ringing the sponge. Ringing the sponge or whatever that is. Yeah. Like, you know, I have everybody give me their metaphors.

Yeah. And sometimes that, you know, sometimes it. That comes to you, I find when you are kind of like just in a relaxed state where you just. It comes to you when you're not thinking, not trying. Right. It's absolutely just maybe you're only saying it to yourself or you're saying it to someone close to you, but you're just like, it just feels like this and you just, whatever. That's, that's the story that you're.

That's right. The story that's living through you. Yeah.

Gosh. Wow. And I love how it, like when you pull from this back from history, it just shows us how intelligent and how wise they were, that they were putting story and shapes to all of this information, that now we can look at it now and go, oh, my gosh, they knew this back then.

Absolutely. If the myth of Isis and Osiris, if that cosmology was written as a modern scientific paper back then, it would have never survived.

Right. They had to put it in a way, a framework that people would, could listen to and, and, and, and allow that information to help them. You know, that's the thing is sometimes we, if information comes in a form that we feel hesitant about or not will, you know, something kind of tells us, oh, I shouldn't take that information in then. We don't get access to it. We lose that opportunity. But if we put it into this framework now we're like, oh, I'm okay with this. I can let this teach me. We can kind of surrender to it, right?

Absolutely. Well, and the difference between acute subacute pain and chronic pain is that chronic pain gets locked into your limbic system, which is where your emotions are.

And all of the leading pain science experts will tell you they get super excited when somebody cries or gets angry when they explain pain to them because they know they're going to get better. You need that emotional key to unlock the pain out of there. And metaphor activates your sensory cortex, which is where acute subacute pain lives. So it's like story can really pull the pain out of the deeper layers of your brain where it gets stuck so amazing and back into a spot where it can.

Where it can exit. And.

You know, and we're just, we are fundamentally wired for, for story, you know, and when you treat somebody's physical body, sometimes their story will change. But when you treat their story, their physical body will always change.

Well, I mean, it's, it's, it makes, it's making me think I need, I want to do a session with you because I had so much pain in my life and now I'm so curious what you would say to me. But how do you from there tell me how, like, if someone's listening and they would like to work with you, what, what should they do? How can that happen?

Well, you can go to my website, melaniewiler.com or please email me askelaniewiler.com and all of my social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. The handle is embody your star.

Embody your star. Now that's really kind of fun and playful way to. Now that we heard you talking about all of this, like to sort of take your story and, and your. And take this. Take what information we have from astronomy to kind of like learn about yourself. Is that what you tell me what you mean by embody your star? I love that.

Well, I think that.

We.

Well, fundamentally, we're quite literally made of stardust.

That's true.

And our stardust has a story. And so.

You know, I help people just connect with sort of like, you know, just to get some pattern recognition for how their lives are playing out and kind of zoom out to that bigger picture. So you're not, you know, when you're not healing, you're stuck in your small story.

Very often. And when you can zoom out to a bigger perspective, you.

Just kind of breaks those neural loops.

I love it. I love it. It's true. So much of the time, I think we do. We get zoned, like you said, zoomed in or like we've got our blinders on and we're just doing our. We're doing the same thing every day. It becomes just this habits and the routines, and we. We're so stuck in it. We don't even know how to get a different perspective on it. But when you can break it up a little to be able to go.

Oh, my gosh, absolutely.

And it's. And I also think we make healing way too hard.

And not fun enough. It's like. And I'll tell you, physical therapy as a profession is incredibly guilty of this. Like, are the exercises that get widely prescribed, described are excruciatingly boring.

It's so repetitive. Yeah.

Thank you for admitting that. I'm always like, here I go again. I've done so much physical therapy, you know, and I love it. It helped me so much. But it's true, it's repetitive. And to be able to bring in this whole other. This whole other way of, of using physical therapy, and like you said, you developed really a method of energy healing. So can you do this with people virtually?

Yes, yes. I work with people all over the world and it's so much fun. Or that really lights me. Lights me up because I, you know, I have so many years of treating people in person.

That, you know, the last five or eight years or so of Working with people remotely has just been extraordinary because that's like a new playground for me to see how things really line up. And what I have figured out for myself is that I can.

Energetically grab onto the structural piece as well as the story piece. So I can treat that owl in your head or the Ganesh in your brain stem or, you know, and how these.

All show up and relate to, to each other helps informs. It tells me the story of what's happening with your body. And so then I can, you can decipher it, decipher that and you know, tell you. And so we have this kind of, it works beautifully as a back and forth.

Kind of thing, you know, that, like, you know, that, you know, I get clues and you can kind of help me fill in the blanks and then we hit new layers of things. But it's.

You know, it's endlessly delighting to me to.

Have somebody's back pain or neck pain or you know, or even like congestive heart failure get better when I've been working with somebody online because it's just so, because it is so out of the box and it's, you know, and it, you know, when somebody asks me if I can.

Any condition. You can, you think, you see, you.

Know, I see a wide variety of things. I will tell you that, you know, just because of my orthopedic PT background like, like I've really got the orthopedic thing down. Well, you know, some things are a little trickier. I have an autistic teenager that I work with who like, we're, we're getting there. But he's, since we've been working together, he's said a few words when he had been completely non verbal prior to that, which is super exciting. And so, you know, some things that was very upfront with his mother, I was like, I don't know if this is going to work, but I'm really happy to like. And we actually did a couple sessions just to sort of test it out to see, you know, and she noticed a difference. So then we went, we went forward with it. But the.

You know, getting in alignment on that cosmological level is always beneficial.

You know, and with the vagus nerve, and I'll say even with all of this, you know, it, it also really taps you into your intuition so that even if the vagus nerve is not the.

Primary problem, you know, the vagus or compression or even the cosmological story thing, you know, isn't exactly maybe the primary problem. It wipes the windshield clear so that you can see what is like. You just get clarity.

From it, you know, and some people, you know, we're all.

Basically addicted to our own conflict.

Yes. You know, drafted and caught up in it and the drama of it.

Yes, yes. And we think we want to get rid of it, but we really, at a subconscious level, our bodies are like, no, no, no. I need. I want more of this trauma and drama. And so you have to be really, you know, this is true of any. I think of working with stress or working spiritually, if you want to call it that, that you have to be. Be willing to really have a hard look at yourself and your life in the mirror and, you know, maybe admit some things that.

You might be resistant to. And I fully understand. I've had my own little ego tantrums over.

Exactly. Yep, yep.

You know, over many of my own patterns. And so.

You know, but the people that are really open and willing to, you know, I tend to get people that are quite open. But I friend. But, you know, I love people that bring me, you know, that want to go toe to toe to me about it, you know, and they're so fun because they.

Because they're always surprised afterwards, you know.

Well, and I'm sure. I know for myself, too, it just helps you to define what you do more and helps you to keep learning.

Absolutely. Patients, bodies, I'm so grateful. Like, they teach me everything, you know, it's so. Because none of them are the same. And when you, you know, medicine really wants us all to be the same because it's easier to research and whatnot. But, you know, I very lovingly say that, you know, maybe 50% of my patients read the textbook before they showed up in my office. You know, like, another 35% didn't read the textbook. But I've seen this before. I know exactly how this is going to go. And then there's always that handful that wrote their own textbook, and it's. I have to read it to figure out what's going on because their wiring is not.

Textbook. It's just not the same.

Thing.

And each unique.

Absolutely.

Yes. And medicine really does a lot of.

Or I won't say. I'll say. I see practitioners doing a lot of mental gymnastics to define what success is.

You know, like, for somebody that doesn't. That doesn't follow a textbook.

Response. And medicine across the board is very specialized and chopped up into pieces because of that. And there's not a lot of communication that goes on between different specialties. And.

In the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. Osiris got chopped into pieces. He was the king of Egypt and his brother was jealous and angry and killed him twice, the second time dismembering his body. And we use dismemberment metaphors in our language all the time. We say we're falling apart, we can't get it together. Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered.

And the opportunity in that is that.

You can't be the same person after your trauma.

And when I imagine being in the story of Isis and Osiris, and everybody probably thought Osiris's destiny was to be the king of Egypt, but his true destiny was to be the king of the underworld. And he literally had to come apart to come back together in a new.

Way in order to do that. Wow. So sometimes when we're falling apart, it's to be recreated.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, that's really the gift in trauma. And when you can embrace.

Your traumas at that level, that this is an opportunity versus a punishment or, you know, or that, you know, that there's.

Yeah, yeah.

That there's a gift. There's going to be a gift in here somewhere, no matter how incredibly awful it is, you know, and to really just keep looking for those gifts, no matter how small or. Or how big. And we see this all the time in people that have a disease and start a movement or they lose a loved one and create a new law. And, you know, that it takes them on these very, very different life paths and what they thought they were on previously.

Yeah, sometimes it's what. What we would. I guess what we might call ego or what we think. It could be very different than sort of what. What really that underlying path is, and sometimes that's a conflict is we feel like, oh, this isn't what it's supposed to be, but what we think it's supposed to be. It may be totally incorrect. And acceptance of sort of allowing ourselves to be ourselves in acceptance of what's showing up and trying to teach us and show us.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think there's a South American proverb that.

I really love. I usually combine this with the vagus nerve decompression technique at the level of the heart.

So I'll have people in a particular position inhale into the backside of their hearts.

And as I do that, I will tell them that there's about this proverb that says your future is behind you, propelling you forward.

And your past is in front of you, waiting for you to make peace with it. And clear your way.

That's so awesome.

And I think that's the truest sense of how time works relative to our bodies. You know, like, that's such a, like, you know, like people, like, we can really feel. That's a big statement that we, you.

Know.

Whenever I say it, people have an oh my goodness, wow moment with it. And so when you breathe into the back of your heart to connect with your future and to, you know, have this idea that your future is supporting you and guiding you where and shepherding you where you need to be. And it's not something that's out in front of you that you have to chase. Because that drives a fight and flight response, right?

Of course it does. And that's where we end up thinking that's where we're supposed to be.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so to really connect with the idea that you're the universe supports you.

And.

Not being able to breathe into the backside of your ribcage is terrible for your parasympathetic nervous system or like your fight and flight system will be very dominant. You have to have the motion to breathe into the backside.

Of your ribs. But when you give people a very technical.

Way to do things, you don't get as great patient compliance.

Right.

If I tell them to go breathe, you know, you're going to like, do go breathe into your future, you know, connect with your future, like, they'll go do that. They'll do it all day long, you know, and it's like I've spent years teaching people to walk softly because the research supports this. That. And that's really one of the biggest gifts you can give yourself is to not walk like an elephant coming, you know, like to make your steps not slower, but softer, you know, to walk more quietly. Give yourself some shock absorption. And I started having people telling me how they what their soul dresses like. And then I do a little integration with it and I tell them to go walk like their soul. And they always walk more softly.

This is automatic.

When at that point it's automatic and it's fun and they'll do it and they do it.

Oh, my gosh. It's been so much fun talking with you, Melanie. And I want to make sure anybody who's been just loving hear about you go to Melanie Weller. So it's W, E, L, L E, R is how you spell Weller.

Yes.

And it's Melanie, but Melanie Weller. But your melaniewebber.com is your website and then online embody your star.

Yes. And if you sign up for the email list, you'll get a free vagus nerve decompression course. And if you. Because I know you get a lot of healthcare because you have a lot of healthcare professionals, like it's just not quite ready but it probably will be by the time this airs. Email me@melanieweller.com I have a special opt in for healthcare professionals about connecting story and body. So I'm really happy to send that out.

You're teaching practitioners too how to start?

Absolutely, yes.

That's awesome. I'm so excited for you to be able to get this information and your method out there for people to thank you.

Thank you so much. Well, I so appreciate you giving me sharing your platform so that my vagus nerve and my voice.

Can be heard. And.

All the details will be at my website. But I have a book coming out in September that is a compilation book where I've written a chapter and I have my own book. I anticipate being out by Christmas this year, so.

Awesome. Oh my gosh. I was just going to say where's the book? Okay, it's coming.

It's coming. Yeah, it's coming very soon. But it will be. And I think the title is going to be the bridge between your story and your body, so.

Well, that's a good title. That's a really good title. Thank you again so much. I'm so glad to get to talk with you and meet you and and be able to help people learn more about what, what you do. And so I look forward to staying in touch.

Thank you. Me too.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdhanni.com.