Ep.167- "Find Your Flow" with Dr. Holly Middleton

This is the You Winning Life Podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode, we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, trainer and certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

Today's guest is Holly Middleton, who is a Canadian and world champion dancer turned movement coach with a PhD in biology. She helps high-achieving people uplevel their performance by fine-tuning their movements using neuroplasticity. Her work uses modalities that remind the brain of movements it has avoided since an injury in order to reverse the root cause of poor performance. She focuses holistically on what's missing in a person's structure and gait from head to toe, what pieces of movement the body is stop occupying, and helps using targeted breathing to correct imbalances. Today's gonna be a great conversation on brain connective to your body, how you can reteach yourself or retrain yourself to have healthier movements, and as well as having other approaches to solving the aches and pains and the mindset that comes along with living a healthier, more balanced life. Holly, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me today.

My absolute pleasure. I'm super excited because I know we were talking about our love and shared passion for the healing world and especially neuroplasticity. So I don't know where to start, where it would make most sense for the listeners, but I have a feeling that there's gonna be some buzzwords buzzwords that are going to come up in our conversation. So I want to give you permission to, as you share a buzzword or a clinical word, to share your meaning and your definition according to you, from your perspective, because I know different fields have different approaches to nuance of what those might mean. So, so when we get into more of neuroplasticity, you know, talk— you're obviously going to talk about it from your perspective. But let's start off just with like, you know, the background of what got you into what you're doing now. I know that there is some really cool stuff that you have done in the world, and let's start there with that story.

Sure. I grew up with a family that was into science and arts, so we have our feet firmly planted in both worlds. My dad was a research scientist, and so I grew up looking at the natural world and understanding my place in the world and appreciating nature. And my mom was, was an artist, so she was a textile artist. But we were all encouraged to dabble in both of those things. So I was a dancer for a long time. I was a ballet dancer and I went to a high level with that. And then later, fast forward, I was also a salsa dancer. So I've spent about 30 years as a person watching movement, my own movement, other people's movement, trying to perfect it. But at the same time, as a scientist, I went into— I did an undergrad, master's, and PhD in behavior behavioral sciences. So observing the natural world, observing animals moving. And so my jam has always been watching, observing, understanding, and then trying to implement that. So that's what leads me to where I am today, is movement and helping people move better. And that's something that's missing a lot, I think, in the healing world, is, um, you go, you get a massage, your chiro treatment, those sorts of things, but nobody teaches you how to move properly.

Yeah.

And we can't teach ourselves because we don't know. Nobody knows. We don't know what our factory settings were. And so that's what I like doing, is helping people rediscover those things that are missing, things that you didn't even know your body wasn't doing. And that helps the main people that I work with, which are active people that are frustrated that their bodies are essentially not letting them do the things they love to do. And they had no idea that Putting them into configurations their brain has decided are not— that don't exist anymore, that that's the key to them being able to go back and do the, you know, running or going for long walks or anything that they want to do without being frustrated at their bodies.

Yeah. So in your, in your performance stage of life, you know, you were, you were doing competitions and won some pretty high-level achievements. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, when I was a ballet dancer, I went to Canada's most prestigious ballet school. That's where I graduated from. So that's what's on my transcript. And then when I was doing my PhD, I decided I wanted to go back to dancing and I had always enjoyed watching ballroom dancing on TV and thought, oh, that might be fun. They had some salsa here. And so I went to that and I was immediately hooked with that and kept going and going and going with that and improving my skillset with that and started performing. And then competing. And yeah, I've competed at the national, international level with, with salsa as an amateur. So being able to go through the process of going back to having to be in that mindset of being a competitor, performer, and letting go of all those anxieties and worries and, and being in the competitor's mind.

It's— that's interesting, Rick, because I, I find that like, especially as we get older, post-college, post like where the system is already set up where you're going to be possibly in a sport or competitive level of doing something that when we go back to it as an adult, it's a very different mindset. It's a very different expansion of energy. Right now you have to worry about the cost, not just maybe a parent having to worry about the cost, carving out your schedule versus like, of course I have nothing else to do, I don't care about school. Right now you have other responsibilities in your life. What was like, you know, and you were doing a PhD during this time. So how did you Are you predisposed to structuring and organizing your life? Are you organically this highly motivated person, or were there things that you really had to change about yourself in order to start looking at this as, okay, I'm going to take this on and here's what I need to do? What was that process like for you?

I have a lot of people that tell me, "You're the most disciplined person I've ever met." But I think that comes from ballet. So if you're in any kind of— if you're violin or piano or ballet or martial arts, you're a highly disciplined person as a child. That's just sort of taught into you. But I also think that there's an importance of the path to mastery and all of the things that I do, if they're hobbies or anything I invest in, I'm very prescriptive in what I choose to do and I'm intentional about investing my time in it. So I'll wait and take my time and choose something and then I'll invest. And I also realize that I think this is important in a lot of aspects of life that The path of mastery isn't goal-oriented, it's showing up. It's just doing it day after day without— and I have so many people, oh, so frustrated, when will my shoulder stop hurting? I have no idea. I have no idea. I can't predict those things and it won't be linear. But if you sit on the path of mastery and let go of all of the shoulds and expectations and all the worries about it, just show up. Show up every day and you will end up in a better place every single day. But don't be so worried about chasing the goal. Like, my goal when I started dancing wasn't to go to Worlds. I didn't know that existed. I just thought this would be fun, and I know I've always enjoyed this, and so I'm going to try it, and I like it. Okay, let's invest. It wasn't that my goal from day one is I'm going to be a world champion. This is irrelevant. Irrelevant.

Yeah, no, it's so important because I, you know, after years of taking a break from tennis, and I was never amazing at tennis, but I somehow in high school was on varsity tennis for a year. I went to camp, we would have some sports stuff, and I was very active in different sports, but I went to tennis camp for like 1 or 2 summers, but it wasn't high-level. I didn't have a legit racket. I had whatever was a Walmart equivalent of a racket back then, but I always loved tennis. And now when I went back and started playing it again as an adult, it's funny that I was able to— right now I can invest in legitimate gear and a coach. But my whole goal is just to be thankful that when I'm out on the court, that I'm thankful that I'm out on the court. And yes, I know that I'm not going to be playing at the levels of someone who's been consistently doing it weekend, weekend, weekend. It's just every time I'm on the court, I'm so thankful that I just get to be on the court and enjoying a sport I love versus if I ever need to compete with anybody. Would I sign up for competition? Sure. Well, I have fun with it. That's the goal. And I think that there's different ways of us looking at things, especially as adults. It's so different than as kids where everything— there are people who are competitive about everything as adults, but I think a lot of that inborn— if you pick something like you said, like violin, I played violin from 3 years old, but I wasn't diligent. I'm predisposed to being ADD and distracted with a billion things, so I only got so far in it. Now, do I want to pick up my violin here and there and just play for fun? For sure. But I think when I'm trying to help people and what I'm hearing a lot from this the work is as important as the goal. Showing up, like you said, is important. So when, when people are, are really going through a physical therapy process, which is the world that you're in, they don't see the changes right away. They don't see the muscle change. They don't see the— necessarily the pain decrease, but they know that they're prescribed a process. What's another way that— and this is a very big life lesson— you do know that— I'm sure you see this at a certain session, clients' motivation starts to dip. And right, what's, what's that space that you're holding for them at that point? What are you noticing about them without them even saying it? And whether you're working with them as your personal trainer side or as a physical therapy assistant, physiotherapy assistant side, right? What are you noticing? What are you seeing? And what's that perspective in addition to what you said before, where you can start fine-tuning that for them to get them that extra buy-in? To that process?

Yeah, so we have a plan going in. So I want them to know that they're supported by us, that my supervisor and I, we both have a plan for them. We, we know what we need to do. We're tweaking it as we go, and we're with them. We're, we're there for them. And I know when you haven't been doing your exercises, I can tell. So that's when we need to change it up. We need to make it possible for you. So maybe we have a half-hour plan of exercises for you and it's not feasible. So let's be realistic. What can we do? What, what are you able to do where you're going to see real benefits? And I always tell people, nothing that we do is boot camp. Nothing is going to be— it might be slightly uncomfortable, but it's not supposed to be painful, and it's not going to be, you know, daunting to have to do this every single day, or that suddenly you have to pick up weights and do things you've never done. Everything that we're doing is we're meeting you where you're at. And if you're not able to do all the exercises, pick one from each category. You don't have to get them all done. You have to build momentum. And that's— and I like the idea that your moment, your motivation isn't what starts you. Your motivation picks up once you get going. So just simply showing up, your motivation isn't there in the beginning. Your motivation comes when you start to see some change. You're like, oh, I can see this happening. And that's why we track things. That's why we track progress. That's why we— when I work with my own clients, I take videos, I take photos, I record record things so that you can see. Because we have, we have body amnesia. I've had people come to me, oh yeah, I came to you because my feet were hurting and I couldn't walk long distance in the summer and I couldn't do my gardening, and now I'm doing that, but now I'm seeing you because of my hips, but I forgot that's why I came to you. Like, yeah, you completely forgot why we started because now your body's like, that pain is irrelevant, so forget about it, move on.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And that goes into that whole neuroplasticity thing. But it's, it's so funny, I was at a networking event for therapists last night and there someone I had a conversation with probably like 10 years ago. And he's like, man, I can't believe it. Like, that conversation we had was so helpful. And it really impacted— I'm like, I don't remember.

Like, I feel bad.

I don't remember what I said. But like, it's that little—

right?

It's that amnesia of like, for me, it was not taking much effort to meet a new therapist and give them advice because I'm passionate about that, right? But it wasn't like, a game-changing thing for me, because this is how I want to give back to people in their way. But it was so game-changing for that person. And I had the amnesia of that scenario because I wanted that to be my baseline of that's just a given that we're gonna have these conversations, not an out-of-the-ordinary type of dynamic. But let's go into— right, so the flow movement therapy, that's your side of the area of expertise. But let's start off with neuroplasticity and just give everybody who is not familiar with that term and concept, just give us a breakdown of that from your perspective.

Sure. So neuroplasticity is the idea that your brain can change throughout your life. Your brain can change itself. So it doesn't mean that we're stuck at the age of 30, that you're not going to change at all. We're constantly changing. And you'll notice that if you pick up a new hobby and you get calluses on your hands, or if you start, you know, you get sore from doing something, your body's changing all the time. It's constantly under flux because it's dealing with your environment at all times. And so your brain is doing that, doing that to help you. It's doing that to, to survive you, to get you get on with things all the time. And so even though we don't really realize it, your brain is always in flux. It's always checking out what's going on in the environment around you and adjusting things, just like the, the oxygen. If the oxygen changed in the room, your breathing would change. Your brain's doing that. So it's always scanning and figuring out what's going on in the world.. And we can tap back into that. So that's your brain checking out the world, but we can talk directly to your brain and say, oh, this knee hasn't turned like this in a long, long time. Let's do that in a safe way where your body says, oh, that doesn't hurt and that feels good. And so we're talking back to your brain and saying, hey brain, this movement that you have cleverly deleted from our awareness is now a safe place to go again. Because what happens with our bodies is that your brain is great at avoiding you having to notice everything at all times so you can get on with normal stuff. So like the shirt that you're wearing, you're not constantly aware of the shirt that you're wearing because it's irrelevant to the moment. In the moment, we need to be interacting. You need to be finding food or whatever it is that you need to be doing as a human, not noticing the minute details of your life around you.. And so your brain is always in this mode of surviving you and keeping you well. So if you've had injuries or you've had— you— the position you always sit in, or like you say, you play violin, a very, a very specific type of position that you've, with discipline, made sure that you're really good at that position because you want to do well. Your brain will get really, really good at those shapes. And not good at the shapes that it's decided are unsafe. Like, you sprained your ankle, don't ever, ever make that shape again. So we're never going to tell— your brain's saying you're never, ever going to make that shape again. Or we are just human beings that are asymmetrical. Because of our asymmetry, you are naturally predisposed to find yourself in certain positions in your body. Your brain is wired a left brain and right brain, the opposites. You know, your right brain controls your left side and vice versa. So we're naturally in this configuration where we are not symmetrical. And so that is just our natural predisposition, is your brain will survive you. It will gray out areas of information and movement that it doesn't want you to know about, because that last time we did that, that was bad. That ankle sprain, that dislocated shoulder, that whatever had happened to you, we don't want you to know that that movement's possible because that was bad. And so the beauty is that we can talk back to the brain and say, oh, those things that you think are unsafe, they're actually okay. So let's show you how to get in and out of those positions that you've forgotten about. And then your brain will go, oh, that's actually useful because if I can move that knee, then it means I can move this thing and that thing, and then you can do this sport again. Or whatever it is that you're frustrated about, you come in to see us about. And so that's what neuroplasticity is, is talking back to the brain and saying, hey brain, thank you, high five for saving me all the time. That's great. But that ankle sprain was 30 years ago. Let's maybe move on from that. Let's go back to moving that foot that way because then you can stop bugging me about my hip.

And it all connects, right? One thing overlaps into another thing. And the two things that I'm thinking about while you were talking was one is the term compensation, which is used a lot in all of our worlds, both the physical healing and the emotional healing world, is what are we doing to compensate for that? And our body is magical, that that's the structure of the body. It's incredible. I have one of my buddies who's a chiropractor but does applied kinesiology from that perspective. I had a knee injury from flag football from a few years ago on Thanksgiving, get together with all my buddies from high school. And it turned out— but the average person would have gone in and just been like, all right, let's just work and treat your knee and the surrounding tendons and the muscles in that area, maybe your hip, maybe. But it was actually something going on in a compensation from that other side. So that retraining from that perspective, right, my brain wasn't wiring and firing together. Is a perfect example of that from the emotional side. And now, if everybody who's listening isn't going to think that I'm going to take this into what about the rest of my life outside of my body, this is what we do in any approach-avoid situation. I didn't like that type of experience, so I'm going to avoid it. This unconsciously reminds me of a family member that was not nice to me with, with when I was a kid, but I don't consciously remember it. That's stored in your survival part of your brain, that limbic system part of your brain, and therefore you have an avoidance to that even when it doesn't even look, sound, feel anything like that experience or time. So, so this concept of neuroplasticity is so ridiculously powerful. And simplistically can help us understand how to reprioritize and reapproach goals that we really want that we might have given up on, especially physical goals. Right?

Yeah, there's people who say, well, I can't run anymore. So I'm going to start riding a bike. Well, that's great. I mean, you can still ride a bike and enjoy that. But did Did you try? And then people say, I've tried everything. You've tried everything, but have you actually tried to retrain your body to do the thing? Yeah, I have a lot of people who say that. Well, yeah, I have a knee problem, so I've gone and I've had massages and I've had people treat my knee. And I'm like, it's not your knee. It could be your diaphragm. It could be any number of things. It could be some dental work. It could be a posture you've adopted because you were— you had a growth spurt as a kid. You were the tallest one and you tried to shrink. Yeah, right. Like, it's— there's so many postural things that are emotional.

Insane. So one of my favorite stories about that is, um, I mean, I have to have one with one of my, one of my mentors from the world of neuro-emotional technique, which is the mind-body modality that I do. And he said he had low back pain for years, and he couldn't even adjust his clients anymore. And he ended up having surgery, didn't get better. Then he discovered NET, neuro-emotional technique, and got worked on by Dr. Walker, who founded it. And then all the pain went away because it was connected to a psychosomatic, emotional, physiological experience. So it wasn't all in his head. There was an emotional stressor that was causing a physiological component to it. So that's one, right? And two, I have a client who had surgery on their shoulder, range of— right, they should have had full range of motion back, but 2 years later, we're still in a sling to protect, compensating, keeping it safe, afraid of if they move it past a certain certain, uh, angle, it would hurt, right, and lock up. Now, they weren't coming to me for that. They were coming to me because they unfortunately lost a loved one. Um, but when we got through some of that, I'm like, is there anything else we can kind of take a crack at? Since, you know, I also do body entry related, you know, emotional stressors. And we went to the shoulder, and within 15 minutes of figuring out what the emotional experience was connecting to that's not allowing the physiology to be fully at play, to realign that neuroplasticity, right? Respark what needs to be retrained and in training. She had literally full range of motion in the office and the sling was gone and that was it, right? So these things are so ridiculously, like, miraculous. But it's Neuroscience 101. And when we both as a body, right, as a body doc and me as a mind doc can come and find the tools that help, like, like I want people who are listening to this to know, like, stuff can get better, and it can get better fast. That's what's so exciting about this conversation.

Yeah. And sometimes things take the time that they need to take to get better. So sometimes, you know, people will come to you and think, oh, it'll be resolved right away. Well, it might, but it may take a while for your brain to downregulate that as a threat. And it will take a while. So you'll do the exercises and it may take a week, a month, a year, 3 years. And then suddenly the pain will be gone. But it's not, you know, no one, nobody is wired the same way. So we don't know how long it's going to take. And that's why that Path of Mastery is there. It's— and I had one of our mentors said, how long have you tried something before you gave up on it? He took a survey of the room, all these practitioners in the course, and some people are like, 3 times, 2 weeks, 3 months. And well, how did you know that it wasn't working? How long did you give it before you gave up on it? And often we'll think that it's this, I I think it's the watching TV and having the murder mystery solved in an hour kind of thing that, you know, there's a linear path to, you know, when in your life has there been a linear path to anything?

Right, to solve a super crime that's been for 30 years and resolved in one episode.

Yeah.

And it's interesting, I see as practitioners, and this is just for those of us who are on the business side of things in all of our fields, that that approach where you're saying like, well, I've only done it 2 or 3 times, or I've done it 2 or 3 weeks, right? We're never going to get we're going to, we're going to attract those clients to the level of the work in that particular area that we've done ourselves. So if you're a person out there that is selling whatever service and you're like, well, I want to raise my fees, well, how easily are you going and spending your money on a quality service in that price point too, without flinching and saying, because it's necessary and because I'm worth it, right? You're not gonna be able to command that because— and that, but that's also part of the neuroplasticity of beliefs and thought and experiences and emotions. So one of the things that I love about what you said is that the time it's going to take is a time, right? It's going to take the time, whatever it needs. When we're working, when I'm working with someone from the neuro-emotional technique perspective, we'll go through the protocol on that too. I'm okay with this process taking the time it needs, and then clear out whatever emotional physiological story around that. I'm okay with it taking longer than what I thought. I'm okay with it coming and happening faster. I'm okay with it disappearing overnight. I'm okay having marginal growth that is noticeable without it completely going away until I die and finding out what nervous system fight or flight's going on. So they can be as neutral to all of those possibilities. And that's what another— the way that I get to play with the neuroplasticity from that side. So like you said, it may show— it may take them 3 years for them to have marginal differences, but to get congruent and okay with that is gonna have so many other positive effects because what else do I need to be more patient with in my life as well?

Yeah. And they have people that will— they have this expectation that you see a practitioner and that things will be better. And sometimes— so people will say, oh, I have a massage, I feel good for a bit, and then it goes back. Well, yeah, because— yeah, that's me— because, you know, it feels great. You know, positive touch feels great and you got the blood flow and you release the muscles. And it's not to knock massage. But massage isn't the solution to everything. You've got to, you know, so I ask, did they retrain you? Did they give you any exercises? Did they look at how you move? Because what's happening is that you feel great and then you go back to yourself, you go back to your life, you go back to your movement patterns, you go back to your emotions, you go back to everything else. But did they actually reposition you? Did they put you into a new position? Did they teach your brain some new tricks, some things it's forgotten? Or did you just feel good in the moment? And then you keep it. And that's, that's what's frustrating to me is, is, and I don't want to knock massage because massage is amazing.

Right?

They all have that. That's, it's, I think this is the beauty of what you're saying is that we're all trying to do what we can do. Right. And, and our fields of training, like the one thing again, like I keep bringing up N.E.T. because I think that's where you and I very much overlap besides the psychological understanding of neuroplasticity. Is that where I'm also doing body-related entry. But you do have, like we were talking about before, we have licensure restrictions of what you can do within your scope of practice as a personal trainer versus a physiotherapist assistant, right, a PTI. So even though you might know more than a lot of people at a higher level in that regard, right, we have these limitations in that regard too. Each field brings so much beauty, to the process, but also showing you, like, even in the holistic or integrative health world, which I guess we would be more integrative because we are working with multiple modalities, there's still not everybody sitting down and coming up with a game plan together. Not everybody's coming up with, like, you know, maybe in your practice that might be more of a common thing, but in the average person, they're going to a PT and maybe they have like that 8-minute massage, and maybe they have their massage therapist that comes to their house, and maybe they're going to the gym, and maybe they have a personal trainer, but they're not you know, they're not working together as one team. And I— that, that's what I took from what you were— from what you were saying.

Yeah. And so we— I realized that there's people that need things that I can't do, and so I send them off to them. Maybe they need airway help, you know, be able to get their tongue in a good position and breathe properly before I can even get into what we're doing together. So there'd be somebody like that. Maybe there's somebody that needs to work on the emotional side of things that I don't have the experience with. And I've had people come to me, and I can just see in the session that there's a lot of emotional stuff here that needs to be dealt with. I can help you move better and it will process some of that, but there's a lot underlying this.

Yeah, yeah.

I've had people that move better and, you know, they, they— a lot of things get released at the same time and they, they're crying in the session and they didn't realize, you know, all of these things that were stored. But then there's some people that have other diagnoses in their body that is just outside my scope of practice that I just can't—

right, right. But that's cool they have that team where you're working with, that's cool that you have such a ridiculous, absurd team of all these cross-allied professionals. Pre-pandemic, when I had my office, I had a chiropractor who is a friend of mine who didn't do NET, but we met at an NET seminar while she was still a student. So one night she was there and I was just doing paperwork in my office, and I knew the family that was coming to see her, and she was working on that patient, one of the people in the family. And she's like, all right, there's an emotional thing. That, you know. So she just brought the person over to me. She's like, can you just like figure out what this thing is? This subluxation that she was trying to work on, right? The mobilization of it wasn't going no matter— and she was an— she's an exquisite practitioner. And she's like, all right, let me check something. And it turned out to be, you know, the hand mode for, uh, apply kinesiology for an emotion. So within 2 minutes, I figured out what it was, sent her back to the office, and then the adjustment happened, right? So it's amazing, right? And, and it's not like I need to fix. I wasn't adjusting or I wasn't doing anything from a legal outside of my scope of practice. But that one-two punch of stuff is so important when it comes to the mind-body, that it is one unit. It's not mind half-life and body. It's not separate like Descartes did. But, you know, when it comes to even as you were talking about the postural, getting in the right posture and why the body refuses to do that, I now was thinking about that, that there is one of the approaches to it is actually for those who are body docs like you, structural oriented, will put the patient in the position that their body should be in when it's in complete postural and structural alignment. And then muscle test and do kinesiology and NDT on that and see what comes up as an emotional— is it purely just structural? Is it toxins? Is it nutritional deficiencies? Or all of of the 4. So that would be the, the Jenga pieces that do need to be yanked out. So that could stay up. So it's reverse Jenga, I guess, right? But it's, no, that's a metaphor I use. It's like I want to find the Jenga piece and yank it out so everything falls. So, right, but that's what's going to keep that from happening when this is the way your body should be. So that can happen on the physical side. And we're also doing that on the emotional side. So that's why, you know, this whole idea of neuroplasticity is just so, so, so, so cool. And, you know, we're now hearing with all the things of nootropics, which is all the nutritional supplements for focus and energy and stamina. And now we're getting, you know, I've been dabbling into the world of psychedelics when it comes to mental health and emotions. And again, neuroplasticity, retraining stuff that was blocked off in the no-go zones or being reopened from all these different factors approaching it. I feel like we're just beginning to start off an exciting journey with this stuff. And it's finally coming to the head with Joe Dispenza and all these other people that are getting into that.

Yeah, and I come from the same city as Gabor Mate. Oh, of course. Yeah, I live in Vancouver, and that's where he practiced and lived. So yeah, Dr. Joe Dispenza, he is just south of us in the Seattle area. So we're in that— I, I'm in that part of the world of people that are coming to understand the mental side of, of the physical and what's going on with emotion and, and experience and trauma in the body and those things together. So I kind of live in that area of the world for sure.

So what's one practical thing as we're rounding up, what's one practical thing people can do? And if they're driving, don't do this while you're driving. But what's one practical thing that someone can do that they don't necessarily need to be in front of you or someone in your practice focusing on this type of work, that they can just right off the bat finish this episode and start putting that into their daily practice?

So there's some things like, what are your tendencies in your body? So do you tend to stand on your right leg most of the time or your left leg? And just notice what it's like to stand on the opposite side. So majority of people, there's one— I'm not going to say which one it is, but the majority of people will stand on one specific leg. And that's just the, the, the situation of being human. We're predisposed to doing that. So notice in your day-to-day if there's a leg you tend to stand on and see what what it feels like to stand on the other one. So that's telling your brain there's another whole half of the world that you're not exploring. And same thing with doing a check-in throughout your body. So, uh, say bending, bending your knees and seeing if each of your knees bend the same way. And if they don't, that's probably some, um, something left behind from in your past of an injury or a pattern that you've learned. And so one side can be your teacher and one the student. And just start noticing. Can I rotate to the left and the right? Can I lift? If I look and I watch my shoulders, if I lift them up, do my arms move the same way? And just start to get curious about why that is. Those imbalances in your body, first it takes observing and noticing before we start delving into the questions of why. That's the negotiation your body's come up with to get you around without— with the least amount of frustrations and distractions in your body. So simply noticing is the first step. And I think that's, that's true with a lot of different aspects of life is first recognizing and noticing it before you're trying to change it. And just be like, so I wonder why it is that I prefer to be in that configuration? What happens if I put myself in the opposite configuration? What does that open up for me? What potential is there?

Yeah, and it means that you have to slow down, it means that you have to check in. I mean, that alone is a practice of like just finding finding the time to do it and then doing that consistently. It's, it's— before we jumped on, it was like I had, I had an early lunch and I'm like, I might as well brush my teeth. Like, I usually do in the morning, in the evening, right? I'm like, I might as well do it now. And I'm like, I should put this on my phone that like every day at this time I should put a reminder to brush my teeth a third time of the day and see what happens. Like, just as an experiment, right? I mean, I don't know, maybe everybody else brushes their teeth 3 times a day and I'm the weirdo, but like, I don't like— but it's not like— but it's something of like, okay, so this takes me a minute. What would be the benefits next time I go to my dentist in 3 months out to see if there's any difference between that just by adding this one thing in 1 minute a day, 7 minutes a week? Could I have some effective changes on my gum health? And that's just right. It's so stupid, right, in a way. But it's the same thing with this. It's like making that connection of like, okay, I have a minute, let me do this. Let me just check one body part. Let me check my breath also, right? That whole thing of just— people don't know how to breathe.

No, nobody does. It's a curious thing that we— what is it, how many, 10,000 times a day or whatever it is, something like that. And, you know, I could do it in my sleep, those jokes, right? Like, of course, yeah, your brain's keeping you alive because after 2 minutes it's game over. So it better be good at continuing to do that. But most of breathe as a response to our past, that your breathing patterns are a way of surviving you through experiences, and that the way you breathe is partly a result of emotional experiences, that you've adopted breathing as a behavior in a way to manage your emotions or your experiences. But also your breathing affects the way you stand and show up and, you know, how you move and the things that you can move And digestion and all that. Digestion and circulation, a whole bunch of different things that are going on. But it's important that we understand that when we change your breathing, that we have a responsibility to what that means to the person you're working with. So you can change the way someone breathes, but maybe that's traumatic. Maybe that brings up all of these things that we're not— we can't then assist them with processing. So the work that I do to retrain breathing is to put people into the configuration they haven't been in, in their body in a long time, and then teaching them to breathe there. And that will realign their breathing with the position so that their body can help use their, their breathing muscles more effectively rather than the breathing muscles they may have used to survive themselves. But put you into a configuration that you haven't lived in in a long time, teach you, your brain, ah, okay, that's a thing, that's a space, and then teach you how to breathe there so your breathing will put you into that configuration. And so the breathing is the most important part of all of that. I can put you in that space, you'll be holding your breath and you know, we need to put you there and breathe you there so that your brain goes, oh, so this is okay. And this is helpful and safe.

And efficient, which is also part, right? The picture I have in my mind is people who are cycling, right? A lot of people have avoided buying bikes with drop bars, right? The original road cycling bikes and have moved to more upright positions because we're not, one, structurally, but two, diaphragmatically, we can't get there. So it's so interesting that when I'm riding my bike and I'm on the hoods, which are at the top of the bar, versus going into the drop bar, that exactly what you're describing is exactly what I'm going through, right? I'm having that compression against my stomach. Everything is tighter. I have to— right, I'm not elongating myself in the way that I necessarily could. My breathing is more difficult. I can only sustain that. And it's not a— it's not just a structural thing. It is a— the breathing is that primary. So that's such an important, uh, just an example for people to understand what that would be like, where you're just bending yourself over and another 20 degrees and how much that's going to shift and change. Yeah.

And we find that most people can't actually flex. We think we're flexed, we think, we think we're croissant-shaped from being on our phones all the time, but you can't actually make that shape well. And then you put yourself into that similar configuration on your bike and you can't breathe there. You're suffocated. There's people that I work with that can't can't get into child's pose without feeling suffocated.

Wow.

And there are singers who have learned how to use their back muscles to breathe them, and then as soon as you turn off their back muscles, they're lost. They feel suffocated. And so if you, you put somebody onto a bike position and they can't breathe there, well, they haven't learned how to flex. They haven't learned how to put the, the pressures that are in your diaphragm down to your pelvic floor. You don't know how to make that pressure there. And so you're lost and your body's trying to find a way to ventilate you, and you start to panic in that position. And a lot of the work that I do is teaching people how to flex, because we think we're flexed all the time, but you're not actually able to get into that position and use the correct muscles with the bones in the right place to be able to actually breathe in our natural configuration.

The fundamentals.

Yeah, we don't know what to do with— like, we don't know what to do when we get in these uncomfortable positions. And so, you know, until somebody can look at you and know what you need, right, you don't know what, what to do.

Well, and I see from a neuro— just from a psychological perspective that that's happening out of, again, a compensation, but, uh, going, like you said, to the survival safety mechanism. But then we're acting— then we're constantly in reactive brain, we're not in proactive brain. And if we're in there from a physical perspective, we're also going to be there on an emotional perspective. And that's, again, that approach avoid. Sade scenarios still kicking us up. So when you mentioned the child's pose, I remember having that with a friend who was having really difficulty getting into one particular pose. And did some N.E.T. with them and went back to a father thing and they were bawling and all of a sudden they're able to get fully in the pose and fully and even deeper into the pose. Because this is really what is so fascinating to me as the body side, where when we start looking at things as that, it's not just body, neck, you know, and then brain or emotions and mood up, or vice versa, where, you know, this perspective of being body-mind or mind-body, there is no hyphen anymore. And we have to start looking at it from that perspective the way you are, which makes me so excited to know that because there's not enough of us out there.

And I think that some of it is that we don't have the vocabulary as day-to-day people to know what we need. So all that people know is, um, well, I need to stretch more, or I need to go to the gym and get stronger, or I need to, you know, so we don't have— because we don't know what we don't know, so we don't have the vocabulary to even— so I have people all the time, I just need to stretch more. I'm like, well, if you stretched those hamstrings? Are they getting better? No, it's getting worse. Okay, so, uh, have you tried anything else? Like, what else?

Yeah, well, yeah, we're so myopic, and our body is myopic in that, right? The body does create those blinders that keep score too, right? Which is the other, uh, Bessel van der Kolk.

I can always—

thank you. Yeah, I always mess up all the different variations. Um, so, right, but, but our body is overpowering our conscious ability to do that and then creating, like, shutting down the brain that could ask questions or willingly do the research to say, I'm doing these stretches, it's not working, what else can I do, Google? Like, you won't even go there from a psychological perspective because your brain won't allow it out of self-preservation. That, that reptilian brain will keep you away from that. And so it's so fascinating, so fascinating.

And what is the thing that you never do? What if you did that? What would happen?

Is that like the Meatloaf song? I'll do anything for love, but I won't—

Oh, maybe. It's something I read recently, or somebody said recently. So here's all the things that you always do. What if you did the thing you never do? What if you did the opposite? So if the thing you're doing isn't working, what if you did the opposite of that? What would happen?

Crazy, right? That's the one, right? The 180-degree intervention.

Yeah. What would happen if you did that? Yeah, why do you not do that thing? Why does your knee never bend like that?

Well, in the family therapy world, there's that whole thing of like, okay, tell me all the solutions. So this is one of the modalities that we are trained in. This is just very applicable to that. It's basically when a client comes in, they've tried it all, right? Okay, tell me all the attempted solutions that you have already tried to solve the problem. What do all of them— we help them figure out what's the thread, the theme, or the assumption that you have that correlates and connects and ties all those together? So now we have our common denominator. And what would be the 180-degree difference of that? So exactly what you're saying, but I see that all the time with my clients. Just rounding it back to what we said earlier, I've tried everything. Okay, so what podcast episodes have you listened to? I haven't. What YouTube videos have you watched on that topic? None. Books? No. Conversations with a spiritual leader of your choosing, if any at all? No. Okay, but you've tried it all, right?

So yeah, I've had people at that— but one of our, uh, the founders of one of the work that I do said, uh, this woman came to him and she said, my doctor said me I should never ever move my neck. He's like, cool, okay, so keep your eyes straight forward and rotate your ribs left and right, not moving your neck, right? No, eyes straight forward, do not move them. And she's like, wow, that's amazing. I feel so much better. And I never moved my neck. You never moved your neck, huh? Okay. Yeah. Right.

Because what you needed to do was move your neck. Right, right. Well, we also know that the structural stabilizers of your neck and everything else is not just there. It's also coming from— yeah, that's the whole, like, this whole— and I've had other people I've had conversation with this on the episode, but just this, you know, again, that we've lost the systemic approach, that we've become so specialized— the medical world is so specialized in one area that, again, like, podiatrists in America, I think, only go up to the ankle. But if it's like, for me, right, how would you know that it was coming from my right ankle for my left knee unless you are systemically looking at things from a completely different— then I'm sorry, I can't do anything about it. Now you got to go to a different specialist. But you really probably could help me if you knew, right? If you were trained in the training programs, looked a little bit more more systemically and holistically at these things. So I think it's fabulous. So, all right, where do people track you down? Where do they get more information? Where can they find more about the flow movement therapies? Because I know you have that, but there's other practitioners who are doing— if they're not in the Vancouver, Pacific Northwest, Northwest, yes, South Canada, West Coast, it's just sort of following a guy on YouTube who's in the Portland area. I'm like a gravel biker. It is literally the most Portland dude that I think I've seen. Like, just the character's name is Dustin Klein, and he's just like literally the epitome of like what I imagine. I've been to Portland once, but like, like literally if Portland was embodied, that's that dude. So that Pacific Northwest region is just fascinating and wonderful to me. So yeah, so you're out there, so people can track you down by going where?

So you can go to flowmovement.ca, that's my website. We'll talk more about the kind of modalities that to use. You can find— there's lots of links to my YouTube channel, so I have tons of tutorials on there so you can see my perspective and try out some of the types of things that I do with my clients and see what it's like. And I do work internationally online, so—

okay, great—

work with me. You can book a free 30-minute session with me if you want to chat about it, see if this is the right thing for you, see if, uh, if we're a good connection, and then we can go from there. But yeah, I have people in Europe, I have people— I actually have people in Florida, people in, in different parts of the US.

We're not so great these days. So we're going through an awkward puberty. So that's, that's amazing, right? So, so anybody was saying, and then if you're a practitioner, I know we have some practitioners from different modalities and the training that if they want to go deeper than that, they should reach out to you also. You know, more about that.

The two modalities that I use mostly are Anatomy in Motion. So you can find that Gary Ward is the founder of Anatomy in Motion. You can find it at findingcenter.co.uk, and that's the British and Canadian spelling of center. Um, and then the other one that I'm getting— diving more into and, and working on is Postural Restoration Institute, and I believe they're in Nebraska. I think that's where they are. PRI, um, Postural Restoration Institute.

That's awesome. Cool. All right, well, guys, everybody, I'm sure you know someone who could benefit from this if it's not you. So please, if this is not for you but you're fascinated by this but you know someone who could benefit from it, send the episode out to them and let them connect with Holly and learn more about these awesome resources. And as always, if you did get benefit out of this, please just jump on iTunes, give us a positive rating. Not because I need it for my ego, but it helps more people find it when it moves the algorithm. And like always, you can reach out to me on all the social medias that are in all the different places that you guys know how out to me. Thinking about putting together some type of weekend event. So if you're interested in that, some type of either like maybe a cruise or weekend retreat or something where it's part of the community, if you're interested in wanting to do that, please, please hit me up directly as well. And Holly, thank you again. Really, really enjoyed.

Really a pleasure. Thank you.

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