Episode 237: Inherent Health with Lauren Christman and Collin Sedlacek

Hi and welcome to episode 237 of the Untethered Podcast. Today we have Lauren Christman and Colin Silasic joining us. Lauren has been a body worker since 1994. Currently her practice focuses on craniosacral visceral manipulation and structural integration ATSI for children and adults, she has taught structural integration, body work, craniosacral visceral manipulation, intraoral work, and pediatric approaches nationally and internationally. With her husband, she co authored numerous articles in a chapter on structural body work and integrated Pain Management, Handspring 2016. Currently she leads Craniosacral Therapy, a Healing Art, a certification program for manual practitioners. She has a passion for anatomy, clarity of method and the fullness of healing experience over 25 years experience teaching beginning and advanced students, Lauren brings a balance of precision, curiosity and humor to the classroom. Colin has been a body worker since 2021 and before that spent a decade working in biological science as a researcher, instructor and curriculum developer. His current practice centers around nervous system regulation and involves craniosacral therapy, myofascial, neuromuscular methods, manual lymphatic drainage, intraoral and orthopedic structural bodywork for children and adults. With an unwavering passion for the human body, he is dedicated to the principle that people can self organize and heal. He teaches applied anatomy and physiology and continues to write and research on topics ranging from neuroscience, manual therapy, trauma work, philosophy, and more. 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, Tetradural 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. Lauren and Colin, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having us.

So I'm excited to dive in today, I know that we're going to talk about cst, but I think one of the things that would be really cool for us to dive into first is the history of cst. Where does it come from?

Maybe I'll start a bit and you can add. Craniosacral therapy is an offshoot from osteopathy. So osteopathy is a manual method that was founded in the late 1800s by a man named Andrew Taylor Still. And he was a physician and what was understood, what was called bonesetter. He was a bonesetter working in the Midwest. And he had several different shifting, transformative experiences where he came to move away from what conventional medicine was at the time, which, remember pre anesthesia, pregnancy, hygienic methods. Think Civil War battlefields, which he was a surgeon in the Civil War. So fairly harsh conditions, mercury tonics and alcohol and things like that, some herbalism, but mostly the MDs were doing different things. And he really started to think from experiences that he had in his own growing up in the Kansas area. Kansas, Missouri area. His father was a physician. He started to orient to the question, why is it that we can heal in so many instances and then sometimes we don't heal? And he started to orient to the power of the individual to heal themselves and the system to heal itself, and how can we sustain that capacity for as long as possible? Making a long story short, he started to orient around something called what he. That he called the law of the artery, which was the idea that if the blood could flow freely and by extension, other fluids in the body, other liquids in the body, if that could flow freely, then the body would be able to function as it was meant to do. Our immune system, our nervous system, we'd get good sleep, our digestion would work well, or blood flow would be uncompromised. And with that, the body could heal itself. So he started osteopathy. Fast forward to the early 1900s. A man named William Sutherland was someone who started to explore how the cranial bones themselves are pliable and movable at the sutures, the place where the bones meet, but also the pliability of the bones itself. And started working with those with manual methods to support balance and movement, alignment in the cranial base especially, but the whole cranium and the membranes that are there and central nervous system and all that. So he called his work cranial osteopathy. And at first he did it in private because it was wackadoo idea to say that the bones in the head move and some people would still agree that it's a wackadoo idea. But he started getting really positive results. And his colleagues who were contemporaries of his started to ask him, like, what did you do? So he started to teach and founded this branch of manual therapy called cranial osteopathy. Fast forward a few more decades. Things on the ground, the landscape of the medical system on the ground has shifted quite a bit. For a variety of reasons. Fewer osteopaths in the United States were learning the manual methods. A man named John Upledger, who people might have heard his name associated with craniosacral therapy, decided to teach some of the manual methods in a very gentle way to non osteopaths. And he was the one that generated the term craniosacral. So that comes from John Upledger. And those of us that aren't osteopaths who do work in this tradition have a debt, a debt to him to make this work available to us, to provide to our clients. And that's the shorthand thing. There's different branches of the work. Some is more biomechanical, some is more what's called biodynamic. As we go along, we might drop into those distinctions, but we wanted to sort of start in this place because we know for practitioners who are interested in the work or families who are interested in the work or hear about it, it can be confusing because there's so many different labels for manual methods. And I just appreciate that. That can be confusing when you're looking for help for your precious child and not sure where to find it. Yeah.

Anything you want to add? One thing you mentioned that I think is a big conversation in the myofunctional therapy world amongst more airway focused dentists, is that the cranial bones, the sutures are, in fact, you know, we can work with them. They're not completely sutured together in the sense that I think that we've always been taught they are. I learned through adult expansion, you know, myself firsthand as a patient, what could be anxiety expansion when I was younger, too. And then they also stuck the whole big appliance in my mouth. It was just, you know, flew on there for, I don't know, 20 or however long it ended up being. It was a long time. And when it came off, everything started shifting and I went, oh, that shouldn't happen. This has been in my mouth since I was, like a teenager. Why is it happening? So, you know, as things started to shift and it wasn't just bone that was moving. My maxilla was actually turned in on one side and I kind of fell into this days. I was, and it still is still a work in progress, but I started to realize myself like something larger is happening here and I need to go seek out practitioners who have these alternative, alternative, you know, going back to the roots. Right. Ways of thinking really. And that even threw me into the whole homeopathy world. And that's a whole nother conversation for another day. But I've. I dove deep three years ago and I can't. There's no coming back. But anyways, yeah, I'll let you all continue the conversation. Colin, if there's anything you want to add. But I do really appreciate so many different terms being thrown out there, especially Lauren, as you were saying, for parents and when you're just trying to get help for yourself or for your child, it's hard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything you want to highlight or add?

Yeah, well, yeah, I guess with respect to the struggle that can exist and just trying to figure out what's going on and what's what I do really, I really appreciate the historical narrative around where these things come from, what they're fundamentally represented by. And I was reminded by something you both just said about the movement of the cranial bones, which is an interesting and still Lauren mentioned, sometimes contentious topic. But of course it can be measured and it has been measured. And in my experience, I feel this all the time, that we have a sort of a respiratory movement in and out, an extension and inflection of all those bones at all times. And just to step back into history for a second, in my understanding of medical history, it was anatomists in the United Kingdom who were looking at deceased bodies, which nothing moves in deceased bodies. And that's where that originally came from in the medical understanding of cranial bones are stuck in adults, they don't move. But there was sort of a scientific battle with anatomists in Italy who weren't looking at deceased bodies. And we're like, no, no, no, they clearly move. UK won that debate and that's what got put in standardized medical text, you know, hundreds of years ago. And it still persists to this day. So to add head into the conversation of, you know, being a parent, trying to find, you know, what's what. And there's information that really well meaning people and wonderful institutions have, you know, information that might actually be outdated to make it even more confusing. So I really appreciate that historical perspective, that historical perspective and looking at the roots and how, how it all comes Together and where some of the differing perspectives came to exist, it makes sense to jump into the core principle again of like what, what's going on in osteopathic medicine? What is the principle there? And by extension, and all of the things that came from osteopathy like chiropractic and myofascial work and craniosacral therapy, which is fundamentally this concept called inherent help, that everybody has the ability to heal and self organize. And our work that we do both in terms of our presence and simply showing up fully with people and then our manual interventions is to orient people towards their best version of health, which is what we're doing anyways all the time. Right. And obviously sometimes restrictions arise, long term patterns, sometimes they're, you know, our lifestyle can interrupt those things. But yeah, so we act, we sort of act like a lighthouse, shine a little light on places the body responds and it orients towards its inherent health. Which is a beautiful principle.

Yeah, no, I love that. And I mentioned before how, you know, I really fell into this role of homeopathy about three, three and a half years ago. And one of that was one of the big tenets that was discussed a lot along with some other, it's like transformational coaching program that I got into for business and then realized I needed it more for myself. And working through that, you know, the creator of that, his brother's a shaman, so working through that in this program, he had just really started to teach me that concept that our bodies can heal ourselves. And so I love to hear you touch on that because I think that is something we've gotten so far away from traditional medicine as it is today that most people don't even know that is a truth.

Right. I think, and I think we experience it, but we are not encouraged to identify it. When we're kids, we fall down and our bodies make a scab. And when I'm getting out of bed, my heart and my lungs respond and I don't pass out every time, hopefully. Right. I mean, but this is like, these are examples of how does our body manage our state and adapt to whatever the demands are. I'm going to run upstairs, my heart rate increases, my blood pressure shifts, my lungs are pumping as much oxygen. And then I sit down and maybe I'm going to binge watch for a bit, but then my body goes, oh, this is what we're doing. And it adjusts accordingly. And so we have that capacity. And the, when you start sort of orienting to that as our central. I love the word that you used Colin. The organization, organizing the organization. So this is a key idea as well is that in our current culture we tend to sort of feel overrun, pushed, overextended. Stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. And we're thinking of stress as tension, pressure, a negative thing. When we think from the physiological standpoint, stressors are neutral. We have stressors that are positive stressors that are harmful potentially if they usually if they're severe or last too long. But really it's when our body loses its adaptability to stress such that I'm in the meeting, tired, cranky, maybe hangry, and I get on the road and I can't adapt to like, oh, now I need to have a different set of skill sets. Somebody cuts me off and you know, I've lost my adaptability. And then especially if I get home and I'm met with kids and these demands and again, I'm carrying over stresses from one thing to the next. I'm sort of blending a physiological and a psychological stressors in that example. But we can think about. I'll bring it back to an infant context and a feeding context and into more of our conversation about the work. Perhaps one of the biggest stressors that any of us are ever going to go through is being born. You know, we being born is a crazy vigorous change of state, you know, and so, and this is true of a planned C section birth and, or a vaginal delivery that went smoothly, a vaginal delivery that had complications or whatever. It's just an extreme change of state that the body goes through. Thankfully, we're designed to go through it and at the same time how we can adapt from that. Some babies adapt very easily after those stressors. Others are left with little impressions, little places of tension, places where things don't move as well. And then the body has trouble adapting to the stress of the first year. The incredible growth and change and wonder. I mean, I think it's a little bit why if we could, and we were left to our own devices, the caregivers would just sit and just like stare at their little person for the first three or four months because you're just like, wow, so much is changing. And that change, that adaptability is again a reflection of inherent health. Anybody that's ever seen a child vaginally born and the shape of their head when they first come out compared to four hours later is watching fit the physiological principle of self organization and adaptability in process. You know, it's, it's a pretty, it's so remarkable. It's kind of Funny, because when they first come out, you're thinking, I hope their head doesn't continue to look like that. Right. But there's the pliability in the system. There's the inherent health. There's the. There are the physical forces that design that. That organized. I like the word organized better than designed. That organized the system's growth on the inside, that one. In the same time, prepare it for the passage through and then prepare it for the job of being a newborn. Yeah, right.

It's amazing.

No, it is. It is. I think that as I've fallen more into the feeding world, because when I started, I was working more with toddlers, and as I started to work more with infants and I started to truly. And I became a mom myself, you know, eight years ago, I started to appreciate this journey and I started to go, why. Why aren't all babies being assessed at birth? Why aren't we looking at mom and baby? This is a, you know, whether it's a beautiful experience, like you said, and everything went just as it should have, it's still traumatic in its own right in terms of everything that's happened to achieve this birth. And, you know, so it just kind of started. I started to sit there and go, like, I wish we had somebody present who could assess this baby and make sure that everything was functioning. And, you know, because I think that's speaks to a lot of the work that I do is the function, the impaired function. When form, when the physical components are, you know, when there's tension present and there's these. I don't. I don't love the word atypical, but, you know, movement patterns are off or they have a side preference or. And I know you can speak more to a lot of that, but until we address a lot of that, it's very challenging to improve function or it doesn't hold.

Yeah.

If we can get it. You know, it's like you take your car to the shop, it doesn't make the noise or it works there, but then you leave and it doesn't work when you get home. That was me when my own breastfeeding journey. And I feel like, you know, I was like, I don't want that to happen to any other mom. I want this to continue to work when you get home and. Or we know certain supports are needed to continue the progress we're seeing and to now, you know, take the next step towards additional progress.

Yeah. Thank you for speaking into that, because it actually touches on another key foundational principle of osteopathy. Which is the relationship between structure and function. So how things are shaped will affect what their function is. And what their function is is part of the design of what their shape is. And that's an easy thing to see in the shape of the mouth, the placement of the tongue. How is swallowing happening? Suck, swallow, breathe, reflexes. Can they. Can the nervous system which at that moment wants to just sort of have a cascade of neuromotor reflexes to accomplish life sustaining tasks, can it go through a soft tissue, firm tissue body that's free and available? Right. So as you're saying, if the shape is sort of off or the tongue doesn't move freely, then we see challenges. And I would say, just as an example, one of the simpler, often unrecognized feeding challenges that I work with with C section children, children born by C section is that their heads are wonderfully symmetrical. Generally. Sometimes it depends how they are positioned inside, but generally they have round symmetrical heads. But they tend to be stiff. So they. In my experience, I see clinically I'm seeing a pattern of the kids that have stiff upper crania, the vault, the upper part of the cranium, the parietal bones, and the upper frontal and occiput parietal, especially that, that take the brunt of the vaginal birth and giving us that little conehead experience and then we kind of come out of it, that instills some pliability in the vault. And when children are born via C section, which I'm not against at all, there's so many good reasons to utilize that intervention. I think it's great. The complement then would be the manual work to help the vault be more pliable because it didn't get a big squeeze, it didn't get to rebound. And those little ones tend to come to me with challenges of suckling that are about the child becoming fatigued. They sort of suck, suck, suck, stop, and they're a lazy sucker, you know, all that sort of stuff. And to me it's like, well, yeah, because they're suckling into stiffness. So it's more work, it's just mechanically more work on their little tongues to press against a palate that the palate isn't getting the echo from above of ply, that's they're not working like trampolines. There's not pliability there, but it's meeting stiffness. And we all know that from our going to yoga class or the gym or whatever. When I'm stiff or crooked, I don't go as far I Don't go as fast. I tire out more easily. Yeah.

Are you seeing that also then continue throughout the body? Since we're so interconnected, do you notice, like, over time that that snowballs in a sense, lack of a better word?

That's a good question. I think, I would say not in a direct way. I think the ripple that happens coming out of that has more to do with the impact that challenges in breastfeeding have on the, on the dyad or the triad, the, you know, the, the unit where it's like, oh, this just becomes a stressful thing and then it's kind of a stressful thing. And then, then there's a, a physiological stressor, but also a psychological stressor in the family unit that says, here's this really important thing that maybe we're missing out on. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. I'm sure as a feeding specialist, you see all kinds of ways that how can it not hurt our heart if things are challenging?

Yeah, well, and I had 13 months of painful breastfeeding with my first daughter because I thought that was normal. But I was like turning my head away from her so she would not see my face when she latched because it hurt so bad. And, you know, we've been to IVCLC and nobody at that point suggested any other practitioners. That was in my Pete's office. I kind of felt like alone in an ocean myself. And I'm sitting here like, I'm a feeding therapist. I mean, I know I work more 24 months plus, but that she's the one eight years ago who threw me into the infant world. Because when I realized that was not normal and that she was lip and tongue tied, I was like, okay, if only, if only I knew. And so the way that I even prepped for my pregnancy the second time, my own body and the way that I cared for my body and did body work during that pregnancy to prepare for delivery, and the way that I, you know, address things after birth for both of us was very different. And it was not, you know, not only did it change both the, the dyad, you know, the psychological connection, that, you know, emotional connection between us. It's very interesting to see Even now, my 8 year old and how she seeks attention from me in a different way than my five and a half year old does because it started at birth. And, you know, I'm like. And it kills me to a certain extent too, because I'm like, I wish I could go back and.

Right.

You know, change things. And so that was, you Know, she really is my reason for getting into working with infants and connecting with these, these parents, these caregivers who felt very similarly and who basically feel like, I've got one job, I have to keep my, my child alive, I need to feed them. And if breastfeeding is not succeeding, or bottle feeding is not succeeding, or transition to solids is not going well, you know, it's, that's, you're immediately stressed and then child is stressed and it's just a whole big, you know. Yeah, iceberg of all the things at that point. But that's where I, I really came to appreciate the need for addressing the whole body and not just diving in at the level of the mouth because I was never taught that. I was taught, oh, there's a feeding issue. Let's, let's look in the mouth. Which was completely opposite of what I learned in grad school. Nothing about pediatrics, all adult dysphagia and swallowing disorders. And so it was, you know, a lot of unpacking over the years to figure out how does this all integrate? How do we work together? And it wasn't until I really connected with some, some osteopaths and craniosacral therapists actually PT, who had various other trainings as well, where I started to really appreciate all of this work. And I was like, well, why isn't everybody getting this? Why is this not a thing? Why don't, why did I know about this eight years ago?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Right. And we just do our best as parents. We just sort of offer what we can and we keep learning and we do our best. And again, I would not to be Pollyanna about it, but we are as organisms and very much as family structure. Our successes as a species, you know, we're designed to have a rough go and continue on and heal. Like we are designed to be able to heal. And your 8 year old daughter is already. The fact that she seeks you out now in those ways is her version of healing herself and healing that little component of like, oh, I didn't quite get enough, so I'm going to get some more now. Like, how brilliant is that? You know, and it, and so it's even a subtle shift of like, is she doing that because of a problem? Or this is how she's fixing it, this is how she's navigating and self healing that. And we are all doing that all the time, right? We find the people in our lives and again, with enough resilience and resource, we find successes and then we have some failures and that's hard and difficult. And then we kind of keep going and we help each other out and.

Yeah, well, and thank you for that. I mean, she's. She's a brilliant child. She is. You know, I absolutely love watching her and learning from her. I mean, like I said, she was one of my greatest teachers. And, you know, she fed around the clock. So she was literally attached to me all day, every day for a very long time. But. But, yeah, it's just you. You really start to feel the differences. And I think. But it's a great perspective too, because I think that she does actually absolutely get what she needs. And she's very. Children are so amazing at figuring out what they need and seeking it. And then as, you know, the parent, I feel it's my job to. To provide that for her in the way that she is, you know, requesting it, in a sense. So. That was beautiful. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I wanted to echo that. That is. I mean, we're such. We're feeling beings, and there's so much wisdom in that. There's so much intelligence, especially in children. And one of my favorite parts in being a practitioner, favorite things that happens is when a child really leans into the work, or they're like, right here. They'll literally direct you to the thing and you give it your attention, and then, whoa, all these shifts happen. It's. It's just incredible. And rewinding a little bit. The question about how restrictions might echo or transform throughout the body. I want to tell a personal story about my second born, who was born at home. And the greatest experience of my life was that I got to catch him, which was just amazing. And just feeling him in that first moment and feeling him, you know, initiate secondary respiration, which in osteopathy and craniosacral therapy, the diaphragmatic breathing and the heart rate, that's secondary respiration. Primary respiration is sort of the flow of the cerebral spinal fluid that intrinsic just life, the motility of all the cells. Some words in there we can touch on later. But anyways, yeah, it took him a while to transition, and I didn't even notice probably for half an hour that he was a boy, for instance, I was just so in awe with what was going on and him coming to life. Anyways, fast forwarding. Feeding was relatively easygoing, but there were some concerns, especially from Ashley, my wife. And we had a lot of difficulties. Two frenotomies with our first boy. The second one was kind of a nightmare. I'll just put that on the side. Anyways, I found there were a lot of restrictions in his left lower quadrant, our youngest. And very specifically on the other side, the gallbladder was really stuck to his liver. And freeing those up and making that space and doing a little pelvic work made. Made all the concerns disappear and made everything functional in terms of his. His oral ability and feeding, which was kind of amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

We have this saying that, you know, I've heard people say, but it never really meant what it means. Now, a lot of people say we see on the lips what we see on the hips. And, you know, there's other, like, little things like that, too. And, you know, we do focus on posture and 90, 90, 90, when we're transitioning to solids and be able to hold our head up and having the right supports. But there's never really been much beyond that to really dive into, you know, the pelvis. And it's something too, that I do this free training three times a year for feeding therapists on how to screen for feeding. And one of the things I have them look at is the pelvis. Are they. Are we sitting straight up? Are we tilted anteriorly, you know, posteriorly? And to get them to really understand that, I have them take a sip of water in all three positions in their chair. And when an adult takes a sip of water with an anterior pelvic tilt or posterior pelvic tilt that they're normally not sitting in, everyone's like, I almost choked. I'm like, correct, because your body is.

Not meant to feed in this position.

Now let's take this back to the babies. And, you know, and that's really as far as I go with that. I go, okay, now go talk to all the other professionals, because this is just to kind of open your eyes. And that's as far as my knowledge goes. But it just. It really is amazing to see. Like you were saying, a lot of the symptoms went away when the body was able to do it, what it was supposed to do when it was free to move in the way that it's meant to. And I think that whole structure, form and function, structure, function, relationship, again, is just not touched on enough. And that's one of the reasons why we really encourage families to seek this type of work, because we can work with you, but if you're not willing to seek these other providers out, it's going to be a longer journey in my. In my experience. And sometimes we can avoid some of the work if, you know, like, I be happy to put myself out of business if you don't need me because you're able to achieve feeding with this other provider because now everything's working for you and your child. That's fantastic. You know, that's my goal at the end of the day. So anyways, that's, you know, I love this conversation because I think it's just so needed.

Yeah, yeah, well. And we're from an anatomy lens. We're speaking around the types of longitudinal connections through the body of some of our various structures. So when you had asked me earlier about the implications of a stiff cranium and how that might ripple out, I was thinking about it in the causative way. But there's all sorts of things that.

Are.

Co occurring or I just don't ask myself what caused what. Like, I'm not, I'm not terribly interested. I'm, I'm kind of interested in a causal way of thinking about things. But I find in my work a relational standpoint gets me much more interesting results. So is there a relationship between the mouth and the pelvis? Is there a relationship between the stiff vault and the difficulty of the respiration or the difficulty of the suckle reflex, things like that? I don't, I don't the kind of reductive to one component to me often like we lose some of the rich relationships that are going to maybe give us some clues. And so I know you've had some other guests on the podcast and people who are talking about fascia and sort of the fascia of the body and certainly it's been in, in the last 10 to 15 years, more and more an identified idea of what, what is this tissue that helps organize. There's that word again. Helps organize movement and function in the body. And we have a scientific, clinical inheritance that is a way of thinking about things into parts. We'll dissect things all into parts. Parts, parts, parts, parts. And like you're saying, and if, oh, it's a feeding problem, the parts about feeding are right at the mouth and so that's what we'll think about. And so local, local, local parts, parts.

Yeah.

And I think there's a really natural push, push or pendulum swing to that that says but we're whole beings, which is also true. We are maybe more true. We're whole beings. And there's a holistic place that says everything's connected. And one of my, you know, mentors and now friends, Tom Myers, who wrote the book Anatomy Trains, which some of your listeners may have come across, likes to say, yes, everything's connected. But some things are more connected than others, right? So what are the some things that are more connected to others? And when I think about feeding in this, the top of the tube, as I like to call it, right. We know the tube goes all the way down. So the GI tract embryologically, fascially, that tissue has a continuum all the way down to pelvic floor, anus. So there again we have what's the realm, what's the alignment, the freedom of movement at the sacrum, the innominates. Is there dilemma there in Tom's work, he tracks that layer of fascia that includes the visceral organs that he calls it the deep front line. So layers within the rib cage, both myofascial layers, but then also organ layers and vascular layers. So it continues through the neurovascular bundle all the way down inner thigh, center of the calf, into the arches. And so one of the things that I can see, it will affect suckling. But a lot of times people are coming because there's a head preference. You know, there's a head rotational preference. And the local way of diagnosing that says, oh, they have torticollis, right? So they have. Which technically is a spasm in the scm, the neck muscle, which rotates the head to the opposite side. But I can have the side they're turned away from on that deep front line layer, a restriction around the stomach, a restriction in the diaphragm, maybe in the groin level, the pelvis, as you've been speaking, speaking to the pelvic floor, maybe the child's also having trouble with bowel movements. But even that leg is the leg that doesn't. When the extensor reflex goes through, that leg doesn't really completely extend all the way up. So I'm sort of just investigating with my hands and my eyes and listening to what the parents have observed and just seeing where are the places where there might be a limitation of movement or a limitation of alignment. What if we free that up to. Then let the body again, the body do what it's orienting and wanting to do, which is grow and grow and grow in that first year especially, right? And learn to move and move on to the next step and integrate those reflexes and do, you know, just be their little amazing selves. Having a sense of those layers helps me appreciate that, especially before they're seat. Before they're sitting, I can talk. I like to make a distinction between the positions that the infant is in versus posture. Right? Because posture implies the relationship with gravity and we're having that we're always in gravity, so we're always having a relationship to gravity. But in terms of our neuromotor patterning and things like that, I think that first. Those first few months are. They're kind of a different zone where our musculoskeletal system is not in charge as much as our digestive system is in charge and our nervous system is in charge. You can even look just like how much volume of tissue is there. The digestive system is really pretty key. And little ones. This is another structure function that sometimes amazes people. But the pelvis is pliable enough that for children that have significant digestive issues, that can change the alignment of the pelvis. So when you go to check your. The pelvis, I would say stay open to the idea. Is it that the pelvis has limited the digestion or really the digestive distress is. Is impacting the bony structure, which is so pliable, still cartilaginous. You know, it's calcifying, of course, but there's so much pliability in that first year.

Yeah, well. And you brought up two really common symptoms, if you will. Right. The digestive concerns that we see in a lot of these little ones, especially once they transition to solids, around six months or so, when, you know, when they're ready. And the nervous system. The nervous system is a big one because that's another big conversation that we've been having a lot more, you know, and talking about being organized. If the body is not organized, baby's not organized, the feeding, the feeder is not organized. But that's mom, dad, another caregiver. If there's some type of fight or flight, you know, versus rest and digest, as we like to call it going on here, then that baby's feeding is going to be impacted. And it was really cool when I had my first experience with an osteopath and my second daughter. And, you know, she was, I don't remember, very easygoing kiddo. But, you know, for whatever reason, they said, oh, if she needs to, you know, breastfeed while we're working on her, totally fine. And so she did. And I could, you know, feel just everything kind of relax in this through. Through her. And they said, you're going, you know, you may feel X, Y and Z. And I'm sitting here going, yeah, I'm a feeler. So I'm like, yeah, I feel that. And, you know, I'm the same when I'm getting my own work and things start to flow in my body. And I can feel that pulse, that pulsing, which I know not everybody is always in tune with. Really very incredible and very interesting to experience. But going back to these little ones, that's another conversation we've been having more with families is, you know, it's a. Interesting one to navigate because we never want to put more stress on the feeding situation. We never want, you know, the feeder, the mom, you know, the father. We don't want anybody to feel guilty that they're causing this or that they're creating any type of a situation. So it's this delicate, I would say, a balance between art and science of having this conversation around baby being organized throughout the body in order to feed, you know, optimally and, you know, and encouraging them to seek out a provider who can also help, you know, from. From your side of things. So I love that you. You brought that up because I think that. That the nervous system is being talked about more but still not very well understood by families seeking out this work.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. That's exactly what I was thinking as you were talking. Yeah. The nervous system. I was also reminded. The Tom Myers quote, reminded me of Andrew Taylor, still quote, founder of osteopathy. He said something. Try to get it right, know your anatomy and physiology, but never forget that the person on your table is a whole being. Right. The balance of those two is so important.

Which.

Yeah. The nervous system. Wow. Simply just showing up for people, like, in awe of that. They're a whole being with all these wonderful parts. And it's good to be able to articulate. It's good in conversational land. Right. To be able to describe like, oh, yeah, this synapse here or, you know, the gallbladder, liver restriction. But it's a whole being. And I found uncanny results sometimes with just. Just being present and calm enough with, you know, consent, which is interesting with little ones. Right. How do you communicate that and what part of your presence and how you show up and, you know, allow things to unfold, but simply just being there and listening. And I sometimes use this metaphor with, with patients that we all know that being heard sometimes is. Is the beginning of feeling better. Sometimes that's all it takes to feel better. We listen, we have this physiolo conversation. We allow a system to relax. Sometimes it really starts to flow into that con. The principle of inherent health. It starts to organize and sort of heal itself. And maybe I did something, but sometimes it feels like I didn't. I was just there. The container was. Was set up so to speak. There's enough safety that the nervous system allowed itself to then just let things go where they needed to go. And that also speaks into what we were articulating earlier about the feedback between, you know, stressors, between the baby and the parent. And sometimes it comes from the parent first or the baby first. And there's feedback can be unidirectional, can be generational, too habitual, and it could be societal. Right. You know, there's so many layers to that. So I just want to celebrate the. The notion of just showing up and being present. You know, it's good. It's good to also bring practical skills, but sometimes having an agenda is antithetical to. To achieving balance in a way.

So.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's. It's one of the hardest things in teaching somebody how to become a pediatric feeding therapist is also telling them that they have to step into a room and just kind of lean into what the patient or the caregiver or the child needs that day. And it's not easily a taught skill. Right. It's something that I think you. You have to be very comfortable within your own self and your ability to listen, because it's not a skill that we see very often. The traditional medical system doesn't allow for a lot of listening these days. And, you know, when I set up my practice, one the things that were private pay. But one of the things that I wanted to do was I wanted to make sure that children were getting results. And this was before we were even more of a feeding and myo practice, like, you know, way back when I first started. And, you know, we would get the results, and people would say, well, how did you do that? And you didn't plan your session? No, I don't plan my sessions. I don't make materials. I go in, I sit down on the floor with the child, and I follow their lead. I don't know why this is such a. A hard concept, but I would. I worked with children who were on the. On the autism spectrum, you know, early on in my career. And these autistic children were fascinating to me because I could see, it was like, I feel like they want to communicate, but nobody's giving them that opportunity. And, you know, I had one little kiddo that I. I remember you just stand. I worked with him for a while, but he would, you know, sit at the table with the therapist that was seeing him before me that I. I basically took over the case from. And he wouldn't do anything. He would just kind of sit there and you know, they just thought he didn't have the knowledge. And when I started working with him, I was like, I'm not doing paper pencil tasks at a table. This kid is for, okay, let's get on the floor and play. And so he's on the floor spinning something. So I got on the floor and I started spinning something and he kind of looked over at me like, what is this?

What's she doing?

Like, she's speaking my language, you know, and anything like that. Very early on, just connecting with these children in that way was, you know, I'm so grateful for them and for my experience with them because it really helped me kind of go, huh? We really just need to be in tune with our patients. And that's going to take us further than anything else we're ever going to learn in any capacity. And with the infants, you know, I love how you brought up the topic of consent because that too, you know, when I may be, you know, I'll ask a parent, can I hold the baby? Can I? You know, so I ask the parent for consent first and then I will ask the child for consent. Okay, are we going to go here? Okay, let's. Can I touch here? Can I do this? And you know, and I'm having a whole conversation with them and I'm first watching their face. They're usually facing me and they will tell you if they like it or they don't like it, you know, and they, you know very quickly if you're paying attention. And you know, sometimes I'll pick them up and I'll turn them around so they can see the caregiver. Because at that point they try trust me. And you know, it's being able to build that rapport and that trust. And we're bouncing and we're playing and things are kind of loosening up a little bit. And now we're doing a little mouth work and they're, they're laughing and now they're starting to put their own fingers in their mouth and trying to bite down on their finger. And I'm going, oh, look, look at that. You know, and so it's trying to teach that to people. We always say to our, we run like a 12 week course three times. 12. Yeah, 12 week course three times a year. And we always tell them we are going to teach you what an evaluation looks like. We are going to teach you exercises. It will not, you'll never get through an entire evaluation. Forget the paper if you need to record it so you can go Watch it later. Stick a camera in the corner of the room and just carry on, because that's going to get you the best information. Fill out your paper at the end when they've left. You know, it's. You can't connect with a human if you're so focused on a checklist or an eval form. And you know, okay, well, then what do we do in the first session? Well, that also. Yeah, I can't tell you that. It depends what happened in the email, and it depends how they show up that day and what they need. And so even in this. I was teaching in December, and that this was number one on my list of three things that makes the best myofunctional therapist was listening to your patient. Just listen to them. They're going to tell you exactly what they need, why they're here. Leave your agenda at the door. Not everybody wants exactly your whole program that you think they may need. I've had adults come to me. I've had grown men in their 40s crying in my office because they were like, they were hopeful. They've been to 12 other specialists, and they're like, nobody's actually listened to me. And I was labeled with ptsd, and I was this and I was that, and I was like, okay, well, let's work together and see what happens, you know? And I've had other adults come and say, I don't want everything you're offering. I just want to make sure this doesn't get worse. Like, how do I just kind of maintain where I'm at right now? Right. And so I think really leaning into the patient, the dyad, their goals, you know, I just. I love that you brought that up. And gain and asking for consent. We've gotten so far away from that. I think the best practitioners are the best because they get the best results, because they lean into the patient as a being, as you've mentioned. I love. Yeah, I love that.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a beautiful thing. It's good to have the toolkit. I want to name that again. Right.

For sure.

The advanced skills. But. But it's so beautiful when within minutes of just even. Just listen, like traditional listening. Like I'm listening to your story and assessment, and you just see change happen already before you've even laid hands on this. It's such a rich and rewarding thing. I love that.

Yeah. To me, it speaks to, you know, to swoop around and come back into structure, function, function of the nervous system. How are we continuing to learn about it? I really have learned a lot by sitting with polyvagal theory, which I don't know if you've come across that in your. So far. Right. But. So it's a furthering of this understanding of we've got our fight or flight or the feed, feed and breed. You know, there's all the rhyming things but. And it sort of furthers. And I loved the examples you were giving about working with the little ones because we're just great examples of what Stephen Porges, who was the articulator of that theory would identify as social engagement. You know, so we know that our vagus nerve, and it's getting a lot of attention lately as people understanding its role in health. That sort of appropriate. Can it upregulate, can it downregulate on the vagus level? But Stephen Porges also highlighted that the vagus nerve comes up and interweaves with the muscles of facial expression. It's got a little branch to the voice box. So tone, the tone of the voice, the prosody of the voice, all of those kinds of things, these are all indicators of am I stressed or not? And as social beings, my physiology, your physi, all of our physiologies are highly tuned to read those signals, you know, so all of that stuff of like, is this person safe for me? Like you said, the, the child you were working with, who when you got on the floor and, and went to his world and went in and engaged and said yeah, this, this world is valuable enough that I'm willing to step out of my world and come meet you here and see what that's like. That he like turned to you and looked and was like, you know, what's going on? And so that's, these are all examples to me. These are all examples of the nervous system that's able to self organize the nervous system that's co regulating with other people. And that's the thing that I, you know, that our history of co regulating with one another face to face, body to body, thousands of years old, through storytelling, through shared, shared song, you know, humming and singing is another big component of how do we, you know, how do we self soothe, how do we train, you know, how did their little nervous systems learn from us? You know, there's been enough studies about physiological, the sort of overlap of the infant and the dyad about sleep patterns and nervous system patterns and heart rate and breathing rhythms and all that sort of stuff. So they're learning from us all the time about how to self organize. And then that just gets Built upon for things like language and gesture and mirror neurons are helping them figure out the world. And it's really great. And so this idea of being present with one another is. It's almost as if we're saying, like, I'm able to be this organized. My inherent health has brought me to this level of organization. And if we hang out together, they're going to start echoing each other. Like, we're going to start meeting up. In the same way that if someone's really agitated, you're at the movie theater and somebody sits next to you who's really, really agitated, your system's going to start to be agitated. Right. So it goes both ways. And like you were saying earlier about you don't want to pile on a sense of, again, causality to the parents of like, oh, are you, are you holding stress that might be driving or contributing to this problem? I get that. We want it to. And there's enough, gosh, being a parent where you just feel like, oh, my gosh, it's such a setup. It's such a setup. And, and I, I would love for us all to. To have some really big, deep place where we can know in ourselves that we're not meant to give them everything they need like that. That's not, that's not the design that we've got going. The design is we give them as best we can as much as. And if they get enough, they're going to keep going, and that's going to propel them forward, out and into the world to live their lives. And how great is that anyway? But if I can give you enough of that organization, then they will be tracking not just the parent's stress, but also how does the parent get out of stress? Right. Oh, mom and dad had a little spike and then their systems got out of it. Like, they're tracking the whole time. So if parents are stressed, like, that's okay. Now you get to take care of yourself and you're going to show your kids that too, you know?

Yeah, I think it's. It's teaching them how to get out of that chronic state and not exist there 100% of the time. Yeah, yeah. And so is that, you know, I mean, because we do encourage families to, you know, the parent to receive the craniosacral therapy as well and to seek somebody who maybe can work with the dyad or the family unit. So is that something that you all do in your. In your practice?

Oh, yes.

I think you might do a little bit more straight up dyad Work. I don't know.

Do you?

I. Yeah, probably at this point when I. My practice waivers, it depends. It's about 50, 50 kids and grown kids, adults we call them. But yeah, I found just incidentally in my practice, yeah, there have been a lot of instances where working on, working on the parent, whether it's mom or dad or whomever, all of a sudden the change starts to occur on its own. So the directionality of the tension or the restriction or whatever's going on. Yeah, I found a lot of, A lot of success with that. I was reminded of the. Hugh Milne is a Scottish osteopath. He said something along the lines of children come into the world, they're fully there emotionally, instinctively, perceptively, in some ways maybe underdeveloped. And I'm mentioning that because it's a nice, it's a wonderful gift to give parents the reminder that, hey, you. It's not easy, right. Sometimes it feels like a trap. There's a lot of weight set up against. Us as parents, maybe, but you, us as parents, us as adults, we can regulate ourselves and sometimes children can't. They're all there in those ways, but they don't necessarily have those coping skills or those regulatory skills. And they will easily go through that hierarchy, you know, of the autonomic nervous system from, just to name it, from ventral vagal to sympathetic activation to dorsal activation, which can look calm but it's a totally dissociated state. It's the. If ventral vagal is the social, social engagement part in that hierarchy, sympathetic is, you know, aroused. Dorsalvagal is the sort of preparing to die or going to sleep. It's not all bad, just to name that. But yeah, to be able to both co regulate. But also Stephen Porges and Peter Levine and a group of, you know, wonderful doctors in that realm of trauma work talk about being a super regulator where you can be so regulated and so toned vaguely in your system that you can walk into a chaotic situation. And just by being there, other people will relax, their systems will down regulate, which is amazing. I want those friends. But yeah, just to remind parents that we can find ways, tools, and there are simple ones too. I'll just name an exercise that can massage your ears that, that tones your vagus nerve. Or Lauren mentioned sternocleidomastoid, which in spasm. Right. Is sort of the etiology for torticollis. But doing that, the vagus nerve runs right through the scm, so does the accessory nerve. So just a little yoink on that is surprising. Gargling water, too. Both the humming and the activation of the breath is super, super toning for the vagal nerve. So, you know, maybe we can't always be the super regulator, but we can do those exercises or remember, like, what you and Lauren were saying, be sort of that rock for the child. Like, we can both help regulate and teach them that regulation is a possibility, which is such a good setup for the nervous system for life. This. Clearly, that doesn't always happen.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Well, we. So we. I know we always have the question of where do we find somebody who understands this and who does the type of work that you do? Because I think that one of the things, and as people will see from the. A lot of the past, recent, past guests we've had on the podcast, is there's a lot of different types of individuals who are in the CST or CFT world, and they know they may have other license, like, you know, OT, there's lactation, you know, PT. I know SLPs. Some SLPs are even getting into this. Like, can you tell? Can you maybe speak to that a little bit? The different professionals. And I know we touched on it very early on in the episode, but there were different methods even that you mentioned.

Yeah. So part of it is getting a little bit of a context for where. Where are you? Right. Because each state has a different way of organizing its healthcare providers, and within that, they might be in very different categories and be able to label themselves in different ways. So understanding a little bit about does your state regulate massage, for example? Most do these days, but not all of them. Generally, craniosacral therapy, as we've been talking about it, is regulated as a massage under the massage umbrella. And so that may or may not place the practitioners in a healthcare context. So that's one appreciation. We're in Washington state, and in Washington State, massage practitioners are healthcare providers. So we're trained towards that and orient to that. I think there's the other context that we're all in in the United States is that a lot of these manual therapies and the specialties I don't know about in the speech language pathology zone or the feeding zone or things like that, they may or may not be regulated by a national agency. And so with that, there's a lot of inconsistency. So that's where you get these. Is it cranio, sacral? Is it cranial, sacral? Is it sacro, cranial, sacral, Cranial. Like, is there a hyphen in there? Is there a hyphen is there not? Should I capitalize it? Like all these different things, it's enough to make a sleep deprived person just slam the computer down. So I would say there's a couple of. There's one organization that I think is a useful resource and it's called the International association of health care providers. IAHP. IAHP I think it's.org or.com and that's an umbrella organization. It was first started by John Upledger and so it has a strong influence of the several osteopaths who teach under his umbrella worldwide. Because of that worldwide nature, they've got practitioners in a lot of places. So it's possible if you live in a medium to a large sized city, you're going to find someone on that list who's in driving distance and they list their classes. You can go and you can see how many cranial classes do they have or do they have visceral classes? Have they taken the pediatric classes? Most of the manual methods. For most manual methods, working then with children, especially infants, is considered an advanced version of that method. So I always kind of look and see did they get their foundation? Have they gotten their foundation and then they're going into the pediatric stuff as an extension of that or have they in a trained way or have they kind of stumbled into kids from some other angle? It doesn't disqualify them right away but to me it tells me that I might want to ask a little bit more about their experience, a little bit more about their clinical mentorship. Maybe, you know, they might have done it in unconventional ways rather than getting a certificate. That's all good. I also we mentioned Tom Myers. I also utilize his site, the Anatomy Trains for structural integration. They have a find a practitioner piece and again he's teaching worldwide and so there might be somebody there. If there's somebody near you, but they're a city away, call them and see if they have friends who practice closer to you. You know, like just find how can I get close to my zip code for the practitioners that I would like to do. And so those are some things I really appreciate the idea of a team approach. You know, think of having a team for your person for, you know, for yourself, for your person, for yourself as a parent, who's your parent team and then for your little one who's there, who's on their team.

And.

I like also practitioners who take a team approach. Are they going to tell me, oh I shouldn't see anybody else but them that my all my antenna I see all my antenna go, that's not. I don't want to walk into that room. You know, like, that's not. Doesn't feel safe to me. And so that's the other really big thing is watch your own regulation. Here you are with somebody and you're reading their website or you're talking to them on the phone or you're this or that. If you start to have little flags go up about, I'm not so sure about this. I would say at the very least you deserve to get more information about it. At the very least, you can talk to. Can I talk to some of your prior patients to see can I get, you know, what more information do you need to start to feel comfortable? And if you've knocked on several doors with that same practitioner or that same office and you're not getting, you're not feeling better about it, that's not the place for you to bring your child. That's okay. You can find, you know, hang in there, trust yourself. Like it speaks to the co regulation. Because if you go into that room and you're on edge, your child knows it in the car. They know already that this is not a person that my people feel comfortable around. So why should I let them do things to me? That's right.

So.

And you know, it's a blessing when we have the time and the resources to do that kind of a search. Sometimes we're sort of parachuted into situations and we wind up having care that on reflection later we said, oh, I'm. I wish I didn't, shouldn't oughta kind of feeling. And again, I just come to that place of like, and your body's already healing from it. Like, you're already moving forward out of that experience. And so how to let it run through, how to take care of yourself inside it. Right. You can go to practitioners and receive a session on yourself and see if you like it and then take your child.

I tell practitioners to do that before they ever refer somewhere. Go for a session yourself, go through the experience, understand the office, understand the process, understand where you're sending patients. Because just because they have the credentials hanging on the wall does not mean it's. They won't communicate with you or collaborate with you. Like you said, the practitioner team approach.

Right.

I don't know that I feel good referring patients there. You know, we need to be able to, even if it's just a quick text or a quick email or just something to check in on a patient, you know, very quickly, just make sure all of Our ducks are in her own. Everybody's on same page. So we get the best, you know, optimal experience. Yeah. If we can't even meet there. I'm not referring. I don't care what you're.

Yeah, yeah. And you can ask the. Ask the practitioner. How do you handle issues like consent? What do you do when the child doesn't. Isn't responsive? Yep. Listen to their answer. You know, I've had a couple of kids. It doesn't happen very often, but I've had a couple of kids where it just sort of. We tried all kinds of things. We tried in the office. We tried out of the office. Mom had been a student of mine, was a body worker and been a student, so was really invested on not only having the child get work, but from me and, you know, outside in nature, asleep in the car seat, like, all these different things. And by the third session, I was like, where. Mostly the kid was saying, no, no, no. And so I didn't really actually do work, but we were just trying all these different things. I just said, I don't think he likes me. And, like, what is wrong with that? Like, why would he be obliged? Like, I'm just not a person. And so, interestingly enough, I. There are people in, you know, my community who professionally, I really respect what they do. And I know interpersonally, like, we're just on different wavelengths. So I was like, you should try that other person because she's not on my wavelength. So maybe she's on this little person's wavelength, you know, Like, I don't know. I wouldn't have referred them there if I didn't trust their work, but I implicitly trust their work. We're just not going to go have lunch anytime soon, you know, but, you know, so as a prep for the practitioners, like you said, knowing who's in your area, knowing what they do, a team approach for that as well. Like, I don't have to be the person for everybody.

Yeah.

If I know I'm a team, I know I've got people around me.

Absolutely.

Yeah. That's something I look for and recommend people investigate. In other practitioners, it's like, what if it doesn't work? And what's the policy around that? And something I found that I guess it's led to good outcomes or, you know, good responses, etc. Good relationships, therapeutic, you know, positive outcomes is that somebody's willing to. If nothing happens. And this is how I operate in my practice. First meeting with a kid, it didn't work out. That's no charge. Obviously, that's sometimes a marker, or it has been in my experience. I don't know if that's always good or bad. Maybe that's bad business, I don't know. But I find that, in my experience, again, is going to be indicative of how that relationship and how that rapport can be built and how things can be achieved in the long term and perhaps with the global intention of the practitioner might be as well.

Yeah, yeah.

No, and I can appreciate that. And I always, you know, I do business coaching, too, and I always tell, you know, everyone, I'm like, bad business is when you're not listening to your patients. So how you choose to operate within your practice. Right. Is up to you. I don't believe in there being, like, the right way or the wrong way. I think the right way is, well, we're gonna qualify it. Right. Is what feels good to you and how you want to do business. And that's ultimately your choice at the end of the day. And so I've seen it. I've seen things done so many different ways. You know, typically, our first session is usually an evaluation. How much information are you going to get in an evaluation when you've just met a child? You know, and so, you know, we explained to parents that really, truly, it's dynamic therapy, if you will, meaning, you know, and when I say that, I really just mean that we're always assessing to some degree, like, what is the presentation today? What do you need today? And that's going to then shape what we do. And that can even change throughout the session. And that's why I talk about that dance between art and science, because it's kind of being able to sit in the unknown, in that gray area of I don't know what I'm walking into today. And that's okay, because, you know, to speak to what you said, we have to have the skill set right. So we definitely need to continue to evolve our skill set and become more, you know, dive deeper into whatever that arena is for us. But being having those tools is one piece of the equation. And, you know, and I think that a lot of practitioners, we can just get comfortable with knowing that, okay, we've got our toolkit, we've got our toolbox. But I, you know, I tell everyone, I'm like, oftentimes we're going to get some information in the eval. A lot of it's going to be discussion with the parent, especially for our infants or young feeding cases. I'm not bringing out food in a Feeding evaluation unless the child has really taken to me and it's towards the end and we're like, hey, let's have, are you hungry? Do you want to have a snack? Right. And we're kind of letting the child know and just because the feedback, the parent brings out the snack and puts it on the table doesn't mean that we have to eat it either. I think, you know, it's really leaning into how do we get this child to understand that we're, we're on their team and that they can trust us. And that's not going to be shoving food in our face or trying to get them to take a bite so we can see how they chew or you know, you're not going to get real information in that sense. So yeah, it's, it really I love, I love, again, I love this whole conversation because I think it just really taps in, into that whole human in front of you.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really lovely.

Yeah. So is there anything else that we, we didn't talk about that you want to cover before we start to wrap up today?

Oh gosh.

I don't know. Yeah, that was rich. That was really lovely. I really, yeah, I love, I just love emphasizing the concept of inherent health and also how that ties into nervous system regulation, co regulation, how that's even possible both as an individual, as a family, as a community, as a, as a planet. I think that's really lovely and worth remembering and emphasizing in the way that we can feel better, we can, we can orient towards balance. You know, we can be. Resourced is a term that's used in craniosacral therapy. Like returning from a nice vacation, not a trip. Right. A nice vacation. You're resourced, you know, you have resources. For me it's music very often both playing and writing it, but listening to it as well. Another way to downregulate your nervous system. Yeah, yeah, but just that sort of triangle of inherent health, nervous system regulation and yeah. The possibility of doing and feeling better. I think it's wonderful. Yeah.

Well, thank you. This has been incredible. Share with our listeners where they can find you.

Yeah, I'm@CraftedTouch.com so when I have a part time practice in Seattle and then teach classes in craniosacral work and this role in pediatrics and things like that.

And I'm@integralsomatics.net and same handle on my Instagram where I have a practice on Capitol Hill in Seattle and I teach in Seattle as well.

Amazing. Well, we'll make sure that that's included underneath the episode so everybody can click through to find you. And and thank you both so much for joining me today.

Oh, thanks for having us, Haley. It was a really sweet conversation.

Yeah. And apologies for my voice. I'm getting over a cold. I just had to throw that in there.

You're totally fine.

Yeah, thanks again.

Yeah, that's 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 Podcast Podcast and share this episode on your social media platforms. You can access free resources and all I offer@halibalkin.com or pop over to Hollybulcan on Instagram to get all the latest updates.