Episode 230: CranioSacral Fascial Therapy As A Gateway To True Wellness with Hayley Balenseifen

Hey and welcome to episode 230 of the Untethered Podcast. Today we have Haley Balanchafen joining us. Haley's a fascial therapist serving the Oklahoma City area through in office and in home visits. Haley earned a Doctor of Physical Therapy degree from the University of Oklahoma in 2015 and practiced traditional therapy for many years until seeing a need for specialized fascial therapy when her children had breastfeeding difficulties. Haley loves walking through all stages of life with clients, early milestones to empty nests, and believes fascial therapy is a gateway to true wellness. Quick Disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis and or medical treatment of a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host, Holly Balkan. I'm a certified myofunctional therapist, feeding specialist, podcaster, business owner and mentor. This podcast is all about getting your questions answered and collaborating with colleagues to bring you the most up to date information in the orofacial myofunctional therapy, airway tether, dural tissue and pediatric feeding therapy space. If you're new here, I challenge you to keep an open mind and join my mission to spread this message far and wide. If you've been around since June 2019, thanks for being a loyal listener. As we jump into today's episode, remember to listen with correct oral rest posture, tongue up, lips closed, teeth apart, breathe through your nose. Let's get started. Haley, welcome to the podcast today.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. It's really a privilege.

Yeah, I'm excited to chat with you and to dive in and learn a bit more about your story because I know we all have that story that somehow landed us into what we're doing today that we never, you know, I know we were chatting before we recorded and it's like never knew I'd be doing what I am doing now. So will you dive in a little bit and tell us about, you know, how you got into your current specialty area?

Of course. Yeah. So I'm a physical therapist by trade. That's what I went to school for. That's still where my passion lies. But I just kind of got taken into a different path using that knowledge and I started with having babies. I think a lot of us can say that. A lot of female providers can say, even male providers I I've talked with have said my wife had so many struggles and so that started with me too. We had a, we've had three children. My second one was kind of that 10% that just needed a tie release and some time. And he was a different kiddo. So then when it came time for number three to do the same thing, she was not a different kiddo. In fact, I just had this pit in my stomach for probably three weeks that this release did not, this didn't work and I didn't understand. And so my midwife team was like, you need to call this body worker. She's a physical therapist and I think you guys would bond really well. So I called her and I was in Target when she called me back and she told me she had a four week wait list. And I just thought to myself, I don't have four weeks. My baby is scrunched, she's not happy. Somehow she's eating and gaining weight. But that is not that. She does not look like she needs to look. And so she, I just asked her right there in Target as I was walking the aisles, I said, I'm a physical therapist. Is there anything you can tell me over the phone that I can do right right now when I get home? And she did, she told me about three things. I still use those three things in education and homework with my own clients. And we, she said, let's just keep chatting, let's just keep in touch. She said, text me in a couple days, tell me how things are going. And we did. And would you believe I never saw her in person? We did all of this via phone and because she was just that busy at that time, this was a couple years back and we just stayed connected and I, people at church had kind of seen and in my friend group had seen how my baby had changed and how I was happier, she was happier, things were going better. And so someone else has a baby at church and in my friend group and they said, hey, can you help me with this? So I'm like, absolutely. Let me show you what I've learned. Not thinking at all that this would eventually lead into a business business or that this would end up being what I do full time. So that's the long version. I ended up, I was a home health physical therapist before. I love working with Medicare population. They still have a huge piece of my heart. And they, when I, when I slowly started to realize that I was not able to juggle two jobs plus being a mom of three kids, I, I just felt the pull, I felt the pull and said, you know what? There's no one here. Our area Besides that lady, she's. And she's busy. Like, she needs help. And we talked about that, and she was so welcoming to me, and she led me truly down the path of, let's take this course first. And she's taken them all. She's done so many things. And so she helped me get to this place of, okay, I'm going to take this class, see how this goes. She. I mean, she really just held my hand. And we still talk. We still. I mean, we talk probably once a week. We started a little study group here in Oklahoma City that meets quarterly, and so it's really great. Everybody treats different ages in that study group, which is really fun. But I have. I have almost exclusively babies. I welcome adults, and I certainly welcome older children. I just kind of have been the baby magnet, and that's fine with me. I love that. And. And you know what's so interesting with all these classes I went to? Someone told me one time it was not an infant specialist class. It was just a broad myofascial class. They're like, well, you know, we want you to get to treating adults. You'll never make a living, you know, doing just babies. And I can honestly say I can fully disagree now. I think there's a huge need. I mean, moms are reaching out all the time. And so I'm glad. I'm so thankful that I was able to kind of prove that wrong. And they meant it. Well, they really did. They. They had good intentions. But, yeah, so I see babies four days a week, and it's where I'm at. I love it.

That's incredible, because obviously there's a huge need. And I think that, you know, it always feels like there's less people who do peed work than adults. You know, like, we get a lot of, you know, at least in the SLP world, I get a lot of people transitioning in who are like. So I've, you know, worked in all these different settings, but all with adult dysphagia. Like, all swallowing issues with AD adults. Like, is it kind of.

This is it.

I'm guessing peas is completely different. I'm like, yeah, it's kind of different, you know, especially when you're talking, like, infants in transition to solids. We're not even talking about chewing food yet, right?

It's.

Yeah. So I always. I get excited to hear that because one, it's. I'm like, it's unfortunate that there's such a need.

Right?

But at the same time, how fortunate are these families that you are in Their area. And you specialize in that because it is so hard to find.

Yes, I. I have history of it being so hard to find.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, like you said, that's, like, what kind of throws so many of us into our specialties as mom slash, you know, therapists? We experience something, we realize there's this huge need for it. We go down that rabbit hole with our own kids, and we're like, okay, here we are. I don't want anyone else to have to go through what I did.

That's right.

Yeah. So will you tell us then, like, in, you know, in the work that you do? Like, how would you describe for someone who's maybe new to understanding what fascial therapy is? Like? What. What is that different, maybe, than, you know, what a traditional pediatric PT might be doing? Or is there overlap? What does that look like?

So traditional PT usually focuses on milestones. So they're looking at an age, and they're saying, what should this kid be doing at this age? And then they're thinking, okay, what's hindering that? Or what's going on there? I still have a lot of that mindset. That's why, in my opinion, I'm not a massage therapist. I have extensive training and a degree that tells me what this baby should be doing and how neurologically and musculoskeletally this should look. And so the difference, though, in fascial therapy is not only can I apply that knowledge of, okay, baby's eight weeks, what should be happening, and I can quickly reference that, but also, if I'm recognizing that baby is not able to gaze up at me, we have some sort of restriction going on a lot. I mean, I would say 99% of the people who come to me, baby has some sort of oral dysfunction. Right. And so while I'm not an slp, we have total body knowledge, and I refer a lot to lactation SLP to kind of gain that whole collaborative approach. I cannot do all of the oral motor things. And so there are specialists for that reason. And I always tell moms, this is not to overwhelm you. This is to make sure that you are getting, you know, the whole shebang. If you're, you know, when you're ready to invest in that for your kid to. To see the big picture in optimal function. But fascial therapy is looking at that issue. So the issue specifically. So if I notice that baby cannot extend the cervical spine. Okay. And the chin cannot come up in order to have a really good approach to a breast for Example I'm looking at fascially. What is going on there? From training that I've done and just kind of synthesizing the knowledge together, I can tell you that I could probably palpate that fascial strain all the way down to the umbilicus at least, and then usually down to the pelvic floor. And that's just one example. I mean there are several. We, I have a lot of cross body fascial strains. So let's say from a left shoulder to a right hip or something in that area that you know and that leads to or can emulate torticollis as well. So we have sort of call us coming in, you know, the neck is turned one way, maybe tilted the opposite way. Just kind of depends on how baby presents. So in a traditional PT setting a lot of times, and this is of no fault to them, this is what we learned is that we're trying to get that gaze. You know, we're, we're getting a toy and waving it in front of them to get their gaze going to the opposite way and doing that in supine side, lying prone and changing that angle of gravity on them where fascially. I'm looking distally, yes, I see the neck tension, but what's happening below, what's going on in the pelvis? And one thing that's so cool is a lot of times with tort babies, even just oral dysfunction babies, those ankles and feet feel like rocks. And so that's one of the first places I start and to see if I can ground them. And we'll hopefully I'll mention that here in a little bit. But can I ground their foot? What happens when I do that with my own hand? What happens when I ground their foot with my own hand? Usually on a very orally dysfunctional baby. I mean, they're already just telling me all sorts of things with their body. So that's the difference really. Fascially is looking. Fascial therapy is, is grasping the body as a system through the fascial system. The fascial web runs from fingertip to fingertip, head to toe. It's basically how the brain creates that cerebral spinal fluid, pumps it down in between the cranium and the sacrum and disperses it throughout the whole body. I try to tell my parents and I do have some dryer sheets that I use, but I basically say if I had a whole box of dryer sheets and just soaked them wet and formulated a person. That's your fascia. It's literally everywhere we can't get rid of it. And so we can't escape it. We can't get rid of it. It's. The difference is basically looking at this whole body instead of just maybe a tongue tie or a tort or something like that.

I love that. And that's such, like, a thorough and beautiful explanation. It's super helpful for me to hear, even though I'm more familiar with this now. You know, I definitely don't do fascial therapy, but I. You know, very early on, before anyone ever taught me, I would look at these babies and just children in general, and I, you know, you see the positions that they naturally sit in, lay in. You know, they're sleeping, feeding, whatever's going on, and you go, okay, obviously, path of least resistance.

But why?

Like, what is the root cause? Why is this most comfortable for them? And it was with my second, when we didn't get the official diagnosis of torticollis, But I was told, like, but then was handed a sheet for torticollis homework. She was like, well, she doesn't really have Torticollis. And I was like, but what does that mean? And I don't think at this time this PT was, like, so much like working from a fascial standpoint necessarily, but it was like, one of those moments where I was like, okay, but obviously she's also seeing something else, not just saying, hey, your kid has torticollis. Let's just do all these things. And then further conversations with some other physical therapists who are pri trained and lots of other trainings. And, you know, I had my own type of therapy and experienced a lot of this firsthand. But it was some of those conversations where I then learned, oftentimes, you, instead of stretching against the tightness or against the torticollis, you want to kind of go, not stretch, but, like, release towards. And it's like turning the body towards where the head is turned, and to help release it sometimes is something that could be really effective. And, you know, I think that just shifted my entire perspective on the body in general when I started hearing these different views and different, like, ways of approaching tight fascia. And obviously, the whole, you know, we're connected from the tip of our tongue to the tip of our toes and all that fun stuff. But I was just like, wow. Like, I mean, I know every. A lot of what I teach now, a lot of what I, you know, preach to practice is nothing I learned in grad school. So I know this is the same for, like, you know, every other profession who's now fallen into rabbit hole, right? But it's just so fascinating because I'm like, here we are stretching against tightness, and a child or even an adult kind of goes, ow.

Like, that hurts.

That doesn't feel good. And it's not the path. Path of least resistance. Meanwhile, you push towards it, which is just like, okay, that's fine. And then it releases and you're like, whoa, that happen. So it's just these kinds of things that I think are, you know, mind blowing to me because obviously it works. And I don't know in the PT world if there is, like a discussion over it, if this is like a hot topic. And some people are like, you're absolutely insane to do that. Because I know in the SLP world you say things like that in these kinds of situations and they're like, where's the research? And we're like, the patients are the prime example that this is absolutely worse. But, hey, you know, that's right.

No, that's so true. There's a lot of therapists. When I first. When I first heard of anything about craniosacral work, which I haven't really mentioned craniosacral yet, but it is incorporated into what we do. I distinctly remember working in outpatient and one of my co workers was like, don't get into that. That's super weird. And almost lit it. Almost like, did the opposite, right? Like, when you tell a toddler, don't give me a hug and they come running to you. It was basically the same thing. I was like, like. So now I've piqued my curiosity, like, what's going on here? And that was in 2015, that I remember that happening and I still remember who it was, where I was. And it's funny to now be in that realm and think, this is interesting, you know, But, I mean, the outcomes are there. The research is. It's. It's such an. It's hard to formulate. Right. It's hard to quantify. We know that research has already told us through a lot of John Barnes work, which I've taken his courses, a lot of Gillespie's work. That Fascia itself presents 2,000 psi, 2,000 pounds per square inch. That it's what a tight fascia is going to exert on the body. Can I produce £2,000? Absolutely not. When I'm. When I'm, you know, trying to force something, that's absolutely not going to happen. But what John Barnes figured out is that if I low load this, AKA go into the least resistive turn, the same way the baby wants to turn. And I low load it over time. And for John, with adults, it's a period of like three to five minutes that he's holding a certain release. Right. Even longer. I mean, they will say, instructors will say they've held releases for 10, 20 minutes on a baby. That's not possible really because they are so movement oriented. But they don't have 30, 40 years of fascial strain either. And so that's. It releases so much faster. They also don't have this like really organized brain where they're like, ooh, what if someone judges me? What if someone thinks this is weird? And so they just cry when they want to cry and they unwind when they want to unwind and they move and we have to follow. Adults don't typically do that. And so they will over time, but it does take a while for them to understand that at this place, when I hold this, if something happens and I'm feeling emotion like we have to. A therapist has to kind of constantly reinforce, let that go. If that sounds like a yell, if that sounds like a big breath, a lot of my patients, adults will yawn. There's a release right there. You may or may not be tired, but it doesn't really matter if I see a yawn or a bunch of eye blinking or, you know, any kind of big deep breath like you've released something. And in a baby, I usually either put them to sleep, which that doesn't. It's not my goal, but it happens. Or we see like this big what think what looks like it's going to be this really big cry and it comes out and then they just kind of fall back into this like very stable facial express demeanor, facial expression. So then we know, then we know that, I mean, they've released and then we get a text 24 hours later that says she slept all night and has not done that ever. Or, you know, baby was able to nurse at the breast for a solid 15 minute feed and normally she pops off 12 times. So then it's hard to research that. Right. So it's hard to quantify that. We know that something was exerting pressure on her and then it didn't. And then we see this beautiful new baby doing whatever they need to be doing. So that's. The research just doesn't cut it.

Yeah, no, I love it. Well, and you. I definitely want to dive into oral ties that really solve this. But first you had mentioned grounding and like grounding the feet during feeds. And I don't remember who taught me that or where that came from, but I remember when I implemented that, whether I had the parent sitting up against the side of a couch so baby's feet could push against the couch if they felt like their hands weren't free, or they could use one of their hands, or maybe there were two support partners there and someone else could ground the baby's feet. You know, that's. It clicked in my brain when the first time I heard that. Cause I was like, oh, well, in feeding therapy, we want a child to be in a seat where they have their feet flat on the ground or on a step. If they're using a high chair, you know, something where their body's going to be in that 90, 90, 90 position. Hips, knees, ankles flat, feet nice and supported, not dangling, you know, and, and the best part was, I think it may have been Melanie Po talk, but I went to, to one training way back when, where they had us like sit really funky in our seat. Like one was like, you know, interior pelvic tilt, then a posterior pelvic tilt, and now dangle your feet and just have an adult experience like chewing and trying to swallow in those positions. And we're all going like, we can't do this unless some people had ties, in which case certain positions were funky compared to others, and some were easier compared to others. But it was so fascinating, again, because just that grounding aspect, I was like, oh. And so when I got into working with infants and I had all these infants with oral dysfunction, it really, really. Not that it solved all of our problems, but it made it. It so much easier to give that. That baby the foot support. So will you talk a little bit about that?

You bet. So if you think about the human, we are electrically charged beings. So we walk around with an electrical charge. That's how our heart rate works. That's how the whole brain system works. So we walk around with this electrical charge. We can either be very low charge, very high charged. Usually these babies that have had not necessarily bad birth stories, but maybe just something awry, you know, maybe they didn't. They were super fast. That was my third. She just came like a lightning bolt and was super, super fast. Or maybe they were slow and it took three days to birth this child. Maybe they had an emergency C section baby. Just, you know, something happened there. So what happens with that chart? And every birth story is significant. And I try not to make parents feel like their birth was wrong because it wasn't wrong. It was certainly planned and pre destined and it was the exact way that it was supposed to be our job as parents. And back in history with looking at tribes and people in that time, they took such care of shaping an infant and molding this infant. And it wasn't just this swaddle and go home to your private home by yourself. It was a very village oriented situation and very community oriented. So when we're talking about grounding as electrically charged beings, we have to charge ourselves as parents, as grown adults. And then when that baby is coming to the breast, even if they're coming to a bottle and food is, is imminent and approaching, they have to have a neurologically, neurological ability to receive that. And when that doesn't happen a lot, if I put my electrically charged hand on their electrically charged foot and they don't want that, that input is too much. I have had times where I have to energetically ground a baby where that foot just kind of hovers over my hand. And sometimes it has to be mom's hand. And so while that does seem a little bit out there, what I found, and this is, this is, this is very well documented and grounding research. There's a bunch of stuff from like cardiovasc disease and grounding that when you can't receive that input on the foot, the brain, something's going on up here in the nervous system because there's so many nerve endings in the hands and feet and they're receiving so much information at one time that I found that those really orally tight babies, babies who like I said, have had some sort of birth issue, their feet are just wadded up into these little bitty balls. And when I, when I try to go in and charge them with my hand, they'll either immediately pull off or it just gets tighter and tighter and tighter. And so in my world, what I tell parents is I need those babies, I need you to start touching their feet. I mentioned just a minute ago about how the ankles are usually so tight on these orally tied babies. No matter what the tie is in the mouth, these ankles are just really, really rigid and they don't want to flux and extend. They're usually stuck in this really tight flexed position, dorsiflex position, and the toes are just grabbing as hard as they possibly can. And so when I get babies grabbed, grounded, what I'm looking for is can we open, can that toe and that foot open calmly? Can I touch Now I'm, this is my foot, but can I holding my hand up for those who can't see me. We have a certain area between the first and fifth metatarsal in the foot. That's that we refer to as the paw. Our paw is right there. Our pad is right there. It's got a lot of reflexology stuff going on in that position. But can I touch that? Are they allowing me to touch that? Can I ground them there? So believe in grounding with a physical contact. So a bare hand to a barefoot. Sometimes they can do it to mom's belly if they kind of get where that foot can kind of touch mom's belly, depending on how they're positioned. But. And then I have mom ground. Okay. So if mom is going to be carrying dad, too. Dads just usually are working and bless them, we're so thankful for them. But partners are usually working and not at these appointments. But I do tell the mom, please go home and let your partner know that this is what I'm recommending. I want you to have your feet in the grass 10 minutes a day. I want baby to go outside and you put baby's feet in the grass. Even though that sounds so awkward at one week old, let their feet touch the earth and see what charge comes back into them and how they neurologically regulate through that. That is. That's not even a feeding recommendation. Okay. That's not even a but. But what I. What I tell them is that that is a. That is a human foundation. Okay? That is. That is what we need. That is what we crave in our deepest core. We may not know it, but babies are the purest form of humanity that we have, and they know it. So they know that. They know that they are craving. And that's why. Here's another thing that I always tell parents. That's why when you take a fussy baby outside, nine and a half times out of 10, we've got a calmer baby. Okay? So they're feeling the sunlight, even if it's nighttime. They're feeling the air. They're feeling that charge. They're feeling the humidity or the dryness. And it's a. It's a huge shift in their neurological system and processing that ends up calming and inducing that parasympathetic effect of, oh, I don't have to be so tight. Then we can work with an orally tied baby baby. Okay? So it's so hard to work with a tied baby who's tight. And. And that's 98 of them.

Right?

Right.

Well, I mean, and this is fascinating because I think. I mean, you just taught Me, something completely new. And I. I go outside and ground and my kids, like, you know, we all walk outside barefoot and, you know, we thankfully can do that down here in South Florida much, much easier than I could when I used to live up in Maryland. I would still go out and like, you know, the snow and walk to my mailbox, and everyone's like, don't you want to put shoes on? I'm like, I'm good. I'm like. Because I obviously, my body obviously, like, crave that. Right. Even though it was cold outside. But no, I think that's. That's fascinating because, you know, my understanding was always more of a structural support and basis of, you know, supporting the feet so that you would have the, you know, the core would gain better support, so that the jaw would gain better support. But just to hear what you're explaining, I mean, it makes so much sense because I'm in this space and this is all, like, totally my wheelhouse, but absolutely fascinating. I don't think I've ever heard anybody else make the recommendation in this way. And so I'm excited for everyone to hear this because I think this is phenomenal.

It's life changing for a lot of families. It really is.

Yeah. Well, and we talk all the time. Like, the babies, you know, how do we get them out of fight and flight? How do we get them into rest and digest? Well, you know, their nervous system needs to be primed for feeding. And so if this is something that we can do that doesn't even involve feeding, to help kind of settle them and help regulate them so that they're even more ready for a feed, especially if there is oral dysfunction going on. And we know that, that, that's, you know, it's like, I always like the bucket example where it's like, if you wake up with 10 buckets of energy and you go eat breakfast, and now you have, you know, nine, and then you go to school, and now you're down to eight, and now, you know, it's like by halfway throughout the day, these kids, you know, even the older kids, babies, older kids, you got nothing left and you can't function without. And so it's almost like I love hearing this whole, like, idea of like, like recharge, go and ground, put your feet on the grass for 10 minutes. Like, it's just.

Yes.

Like so much. Yes. So anyways, okay, so now can we dive into also more of the oral Thai conversation just in terms of, you know, the fascial therapy and, you know, its role? I guess with oral ties.

Sure. Yeah. So what we're looking at in that realm, if I get to. And my ideal client comes to me saying, I don't know if I want to have a frenecy done, right, that's my ideal client or my other ideal client is someone that has had a release and said, you know, can say I didn't get the outcome that I wanted. My. I didn't get it. So then we got to, number one, identify what is the outcome for both parties. For the one who's coming to me pre frenectomy, that. That ideal person, that's one that's seeking this body work, this fascia work. And then the other ideal client of I didn't get my outcome. Well, number one, what was your outcome? So we've got to. We've got to establish that. How do you know? And I always ask parents, and then it gets them. A lot of times, how will you know that you have a. That this is better? Like, what will tell, you know, I need. I need. We've got to have that come out. And a lot of times they haven't thought that through. They've just heard from a lactation, a midwife, a pediatrician, that their baby is tied and their baby's not eating. And they've gone through this, like, very subjective checklist of clicking pain, gassy, so much spitting up, you know, not sleeping, not pooping, and kind of done this very subjective checklist. And I would say a lot of times that checklist can just be labeled body tension. And then subsequently there's this piece of tissue that's in the way or that's just too tight for them to lift. So in the realm of fascia work, we want to pull the body into an optimal posture because we want to expose the entire frenum. No matter which frenum we feel is tied. Okay, so I've had some clients who have had two, three, four tongue releases on these babies, and they didn't get their outcome. So now they're coming to me and they're thinking, what do we do? Well, why did we. Why did this happen? Well, as baby grew, he was releasing his own fascia and more kept showing up. The tongue continued to pull out of the back of the throat and present, present itself. And that's a whole nother segment on why, you know, that we would do two, three, and four releases. But in that other opposite client that I mentioned, where they're coming pre frenectomy, what I'm looking for is, can I open this baby can my cervical spine start lengthening and opening? Can my lumbar spine and my lumbosacral junction, can that come to a. A neutral position where the glutes are able to activate and mound instead tuck like they were in the womb? Because if you cannot mound those glutes and the hips cannot roll in that direction really freely, the hips need to be moving really freely. The throat is never going to. It's not going to be open. And then you're going to have this delayed, you know, baby's not sitting on time, baby's having difficulty crawling, and that goes more into that PT side of things. But it does end up playing out. You can have a baby who starts eating well, but they've never activated the glutes. And then we see this, you know, we kind of see this discomfort. Maybe poop isn't going well. It starts really early, and you see these little signs. But when we get into this optimal posture where the throat has opened with the cervical spine lengthening, because a lot of these babies don't really have a neck, right? So they're kind of like here and, you know, they don't have a neck yet. And we want that neck to emerge. When the neck emerges and those hips and they start rolling in that good position, the tongue emerges from the bottom of the throat. You know, everybody has those seven frena in the mouth. And I try to remind my clients that that's not bad. Those are not bad things. We all have fingernails. Like, we all, you know, we all have hair. It's just something that we have that's anatomically correct. And we want to get that baby opened, you know, we want to get that cervical spine open, the hips opened. And then if we're still having a range of motion deficit, let's go take care of that. We have a good provider. We have good providers here in Oklahoma City who can do that, that I trust. And they know when things are optimally timed. And I think that's what it's all about, is fascia therapy. Fascial therapy can really mold that baby. Like we talked about earlier, when the tribes used to do this and they used to work the baby's head, work the baby's ribs, work the baby's hips, you know, and to welcome them into world, essentially. But they were shaping them. They were shaping their body, and we didn't. We know it now. I mean, we. They probably knew it then too, that that was how baby would learn to eat. When we think mammalian, we think, I. I just think cattle, because My husband grew up raising cattle. They lick their newborn just like a dog. You know, they lick and lick and lick their newborn. They're shaping them in that time, like, they are doing the shaping. They are. They are eliciting that neurological response of, okay, wake up. I'm lick. You know, I'm licking you. I'm getting you shaped. I'm getting you primed and ready, you know, and they lick them to a point where they are ready to get up and walk and come nurse.

You know, all I can think is, like, what amazing sensory motor input. Like, how amazing is that?

Yes, well, we don't lick our yawn.

Unfortunately, we don't do that. I'm thankful for that.

But that's what fascia therapy is doing, is it's priming baby. If I could get my hands on a baby at 48 to 72 hours postpartum, I mean, that's a dream come true. I've done it, like, three or four times, and I just feel so privileged and honored to be invited into that space and to be able to even hold that infant and help shape them and. But we're also shaping mamas, right? And so in that. In that realm, what I try to suggest, too, is I would love to get a mom on the table, even in a chair. I can treat her seat seated. I've had a lot of issues where the cervical spine is being stubborn and it's not opening up for baby, or baby's just so dysregulated neurologically that he. He or she will not allow me to touch. That's okay. That's telling me a lot of things. You know, usually we've got to go home and work on the grounding, on the feet. Got to do that a lot in. In the ankle range of motion before baby. Those super tight ones will allow me to get in there and touch. But I always recommend to my moms, let me get my hands on you, because if I can open you up, I can open B up. And that's happened countless times where mom has had. I've done some fascial work on mom's cranium on the head, and mom has fallen into her own unwind baby in cervical extension, unbeknownst to her. And subsequently, I get hands on baby. Maybe next session or maybe in that session. And what do you know? Baby's falling into cervical extension. So mom's posture is truly imprinting upon baby. We can talk about that too. But, yeah, with the fascial work, we're trying to pull the tongue out of the back of the throat. And that happens when the cervical spine opens, when the hips free flow. Okay. When the ribs are able to move in all directions, up, down, side to side and twisting. And that's, that's what we do. That's what fascial therapy does.

Yeah, well. And I think, you know, in a more like, simplistic way of like what we do without having that fascial training but doing like, from an oral motor standpoint. I often try to explain to parents that we, we. We need to make sure that any tension that is presenting is addressed before we ever send a baby for a release. Because one. That tension could be mimicking tight fascia that's like. Or a tied. A tongue tie or maybe there's just other fascia that's tight. And this is the comp. Compensatory pattern that baby's currently existing in. And great compensations are great if it's helping us, you know, achieve function right now. But like, how do we undo that and get them back to that, like, homeostasis where they don't require any compensations? And, you know, so that's why it's. I just like, every day I'm like, I feel like we're getting one day closer to hopefully having providers and parents, you know, hear it enough or understand it enough or even maybe hear it for the same time, you know, a tongue tie release is not your end. All, be all. And do we need them sometimes? Absolutely. But we have to prep the body. No matter if you're a newborn or you're 75 years old, you've got to prep the body. And again, sometimes you always say to parents, like, hey, you know what? We're going to work together, together for probably two to three weeks. And at that point will. And this is usually an older children, like, and you know, or when I say older, I mean like toddlers and elementary, middle school, not, you know, infants. But I usually say within two to three weeks when we've been working together and you're doing what, you know, the carryover and stuff at home, then we will typically know one. If there's other referrals that are necessary, we'll have meet those referrals, we'll be able to start working with others, but we typically will know where we're headed.

Right.

I can't give you that answer today because I don't know, we haven't had enough time to even dive in and see a response to understand what, you know, what is happening other than me assessing the child and Having an idea of, okay, here's where you. Where we are today. Here's where you want to be. Like you said, asking the family, what is your goal? What does happy, relaxed, easy feeding or sleep or digestion or, you know, emptying bowels? Like, what does that look like for you and your child and your family? Okay, great. This is what everyone says we should be doing, but what is your goal? Right. You know, and kind of understanding how to get from where we are today to that point. I think it's just that that educational piece is so critical if, you know, more important than anything else, honestly. Because at the end of the day, I'd rather have a family who has all the information and then decides whatever is best for them than a family who goes in blindly has a release for their child. And, you know, yes, we get the calls all the time. My kid just had a release. We were told to call you, you. And we're like.

Yes.

All right. Well, it's like. And they want to get in, like, today or tomorrow.

Today. Yes. Okay. That's.

Not that we can't do that, but.

We'Ll see what we can work out.

Yeah. So. But anyways, I would love for you to talk about the posture piece. You mentioned that, you know, improving posture on, you know, mom and just, you know, addressing mom. We know that baby is basically an extension of mom even outside of the womb. And I would love for you to speak to that. That comment you made about improving posture and how that can really impact baby and the family.

Sure. So that's a huge piece of my work. I really got more into posture and this kind of section of therapy with Michelle Chatham. I've been working with her through a mentorship program for the last several months and have been introduced to this postural concept called bowspring. So bowspring is just basically what we talked about earlier. Opening the throat, opening the rib cage, opening the pelvis. It is. It is a. A way to re. Pattern the. The ways that we always walk around. Okay. So, I mean, I have. And I've mentioned this to a lot of my moms. I've been doing bow now for about two months, which I know sounds very minimal. And in the life game of life. Right. But I've been two to three times a week for the last two months, and it is. It's radically changed. Radically changed how I stand, how I sit, how I breathe. And I think, mom, the posture is the missing piece, in my opinion. It is the missing piece. There's no fascial therapy. There's no tongue tie release. There's no medication that can. Can produce the effects on the body that posture changes can. When we think about how I just talked about the baby and how I want to get them out of that tail tuck position where their pelvis just kind of free flows and the glutes are able to mound and take control of the core, right? We always think of our core, even as adults, as this like zipper effect along the midline, like we're sucking in. And I've been guilty for 30 years probably of sucking in and, and, you know, trying to create this waste, but then also subsequently shrinking myself, kind of bringing that down in order to try to either produce some sort of abdominal representation of abdominal muscles or I don't know. But all basically BO Spring has reframed the way that I stand, sit and move when I incorporate that into my babies, into their treatments. I just took a before and after yesterday. In one treatment, we went from baby, baby on the breast, basically attaching to very little tissue on the breast and just facing almost the opposite direction, doing a little postural stuff, a little fascial work, and then putting baby back on that same breast and seeing this very open, wavy child where they were not tucked, they were open. Their gaze was towards the horizon, which is for them, looking at mom or looking towards mom's armpit pit. The glutes were back and rooted and situated backward. The belly was very long and very soft and not drawn in and sucked together. And the feet were calm. The feet were calm and not graspy, you know, not grab. Trying to grab something. It was really beautiful. We have a lot of work to do with that, kiddo. But it was still a one session phenomenon. That's not common. I mean, it happens. But it was really cool just to do some postural work with him. And I recommended to mom, I said, you can do the same exact thing. Your body and your shape is going to directly imprint upon your child. Because if the child in their brain, the way that we are, the way that we are created is that if I look and sound like you, I'm safe. I'm not an outcast. I'm not a member of some other family. I'm not, you know, you know, I'm not over there. If I look like you and I sound like you and I walk and move like you, I'm safe. I belong to you. And that's what babies crave. That's what we all crave. We all want to belong and we want to feel that sense of that Sense of safety. And so what I recommend to my moms is getting in a boat class and learning what it's about. You can. You can go to. I think we're going to tag that in the show. Notes to. Amanda teaches Globo grow. And she's a fantastic teacher. And she kind of. You can jump right in. You don't have to know anything about it. I didn't really. I just knew that something was important with my hands and something was important with my feet. And I have quite an extensive exercise background with my bachelor's degree and even. Even years previous to that. But. And then, of course, through physical therapy as well, it came extremely natural to me. I'm not a yoga person. I don't dance. I have never done, like, acrobatic gymnastics or anything, like. But it made so much sense that if I will turn my glutes on in the way that they need to be turned on, I have to open my throat. My tongue has to come up to the roof of my mouth. It has to. I have to nasal breathe. I cannot leave my chin down and try to open my glutes and keep a soft belly. It doesn't work. And so when I recognize that in my own body and then applied that to my patients, I had been applying some without knowing it. But then when you experience it for yourself and you recognize the changes that you're making in your own body and how. When moms make these changes, it's so simple. Requires very. I mean, it requires nothing. To take a BOW class, you need a phone. That's all you need. You need a phone that has a camera that you can open, zoom. Okay? So it changes things. It really does. And that posture that you're creating is imprinting upon your child. And we have a lot of. Of people in those classes who will share photos of. I did a BOW class. Two days later, here's my baby nursing in this really beautiful escur. They didn't touch baby. They didn't bring baby in for. For a treatment. It just imprinted in that way because of how we are created and how we're made, how our ner. How neurologically, babies, from the very, very beginning just want to look like Mom. They just want to look like they're people, right? So it's really fascinating. Posture is awesome. It teaches you so many things about yourself, but it also has a lot of, like, kind of psycho emotional effects as well. When you're opening a rib cage and Amanda is telling you to. To let your pelvic floor get very long. Those are emotional places. Those are. They hold a lot of emotion. Especially even the belly getting long. How many years have you sucked in? I mean, I just. I can't count. Like, I literally am so sad, but so happy that I found this. But I have sucked in for years and years and years. Well, that's just drawn my glutes down and under. And instead of mounding them and being confident. And that's another. That's part of that psycho emotional complex, is when those glutes mound, you're confident. I mean, you can't help but be that way. You're opening yourself to new ideas, and then grounding doesn't seem so weird. And, you know, getting sunlight doesn't seem so weird. Weird. So posture changes can really be significant when mom gets involved as well.

That's very cool.

That's.

I'm like, over here, like, Googling, like, okay, how, like, let's go get ourselves into this thing. Because my, you know, I'm. I'm low tone. My posture is not great. Like, so I'm like, I need this. And I've been told, like, I. Not to do yoga. I've been told, like, if anything, do, like, Pilates to, like, really build my core and everything. But now I'm like, I need to know what that I need to know about this thing. Now, you also had mentioned. I don't know if we talked, like, about it while recording, but, you know, therapy isn't necessarily everything. And so I don't know if that ties into part of, like, this conversation we were just having about posture or if there's, like, more beyond that. So can you speak to what is everything?

Yeah, what is everything? Your human foundation. That's everything that means something different to every person. And I'm quick to acknowledge that, that it means something different to every person. But it goes with your outcome. What? Your own outcome. How do I know that I've achieved my outcome? What does that look like? How do I get there? Okay, so our world is so fast track. Please give me the quickest way. Any tip, any trick, any shortcut that I can take. That's not what this is. And I tell people, if they want, that I'm not the therapist for them. There are probably really great people who can give you tips and tricks. And for me, it's not. It's a lifestyle for foundation. Therapy is not. Is not all of it there. You've got to have. You got to have charge. Everybody needs to be charged. That's really all it boils down to when you sit under fluorescent lighting inside in a, in an air conditioned, humidity controlled room for, you know, all day long, it just, it depletes your charge. It depletes your charge. We start seeing, you know, the postpartum depression and anxiety and baby is, is feeding off of that directly and it's hard to really navigate around that. But a good foundation of sleep, mitigating stress, getting some grounding in, getting some sunlight. That's a huge one for me as well. Sunlight is a, is a natural medicine. It is just, it is literally God's medicine gift to us. It is just such a wonderful situation to, to be receiving sunlight on your skin, on as much skin as much possible. Truly. I tell my mom is please get baby down to a diaper and get them about 10 minutes of sun before 10am that's one of my recommendations. Including themselves, if they're able. You know, sometimes they put baby down for a nap and go outside and get their own sun. You know, are we getting minerals? Epsom salt baths are huge. That's a big deal. You know, don't have to do it every bath. Please don't do it every bath. But you know, once a week, a good Epsom salt soak that's unscented is super helpful for the charge. But that foundation is everything. It is not the therapy, it is not the frenectomy, it is not the medication. The foundation is everything. When we have a foundation set, then we can go up and we can look for the next step. What do I need to do next? Is that therapy? Is that Cairo? Is that, you know, what, what? And then you can start building upon that until, you know, you've done all those things and you get to the top and maybe of that is a tongue tie release. And then we work down and we see what, you know, if we've done the tie release, we got to come back down and make sure our bottom is set, our foundation is set, and then we go from there. So that's really the foundation. The therapy and the frenectomy is just such a small blimp of the big picture of what this all looks like.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. So, all right. I know we talked about, about like a lot of amazing, amazing topics today. Is there anything else that you feel like we didn't cover that you want to share?

I think it's just so important to get some sunlight. I know I just mentioned that like 30 seconds ago, but get some sunlight and it's going to be hard as we get into fall and Especially winter. I think a lot of people just forget that being outside is, is truly helpful to your entire body, your whole whole system. We just forget. We get busy, we put our kids in school or we homeschool and we're at the table or whatever and we just, you know, we think, oh, they had recess today, so that's good. You know, check in with yourself. You know, if your kid is having a hard day, your baby is crying incessantly. Has the, has baby seen sunlight today? You know, has baby seen some water today? Have they felt some water today? Maybe just on the feet again with the neurological input. And then usually, if there's one thing I can tell parents to work on just from afar, from, from a podcast world, is rub their little bottoms. Those glutes are just so. They've been so stretched from being in the womb and so tight in that posterior pelvic tilt and, and they've been stretched out and we're wanting them to come back and mount. Just kind of give them some love and give them some attention. I do that a lot. And when I move those, those Gl hips around. It happened just yesterday. We watched a baby's throat just, I mean, come way up and open and we didn't even touch it. So give those glutes some love in. Especially during diaper changes. They love it. I mean, you can, you can literally just hold the bot, hold their bottoms during a diaper change and you can watch their facial expression. Just say thank you so much. So, yeah, sunlight and rub some bottoms.

I love it. And where can everybody find you?

So my website will link down in the show notes is bravotherapy solutions.com I'm located in Oklahoma City but always willing to have fly ins and drive ins. And then my Instagram is Bravotherapy llc. So yeah, I'm easily reachable on both of those platforms.

Well, Haley, thank you so, so very much for joining me today. This was, I mean, I, I learned a ton from you and I know our listeners are going to love this episode. So thank you for your time and for joining me.

Thank you for having me. It's been great.

Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you found value in this episode and want to hear more of these Myotots, airway and feeding related episodes, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode on your social media platforms. You can access free resources and all I offer@halibalkin.com or pop over to Hollybalken on Instagram to get all the latest updates.