14: Stop Ignoring Your Fascia If You Want REAL Pain Relief w/ Deanna Hansen

Hello and welcome to the Full Circle Healing Podcast where we merge modern cutting edge science with traditional healing wisdom and everything in between to help you come full circle back to your original natural state of health and well being. I'm your host, Michael, and over the past 15 years I've helped hundreds of thousands of people find the information, practices, tools, resources and experts they needed to find their way back to optimal health. Our guest in this episode is a leading expert on a topic most people in the functional health world overlook, Deanna Hanson, and that topic is fascia. Deanna is a pioneer in the field of fascia decompression for physical and emotional transformation and a best selling author in the wellness space. With more than 20 years of hands on clinical experience, Deanna created fluid isometrics and block therapy, unique fascia release techniques to help relieve chronic pain and disease, encourage healthy detoxification and reverse the aging process. With these simple step by step protocols, you'll combine diaphragmatic breathing and deep tissue work to release adhesions and scar tissue in the fascia, oxygenate cells, rebuild postural foundations, and ultimately reverse chronic structural and emotional issues. In this episode, you'll learn all about fascia, the body's hidden communication network, and how it impacts your overall health. You'll learn how chronic pain can be traced back to tightness and adhesions in your fascia and how you can release this to find relief. You'll learn how emotions and trauma manifest physically through the fascia, causing pain and other symptoms. And you'll learn how proper alignment, fascia work and correct breathing patterns can enhance your body's overall well being. And a ton more about this fascinating and often overlooked subject that's missing in most functional medicine circles. I truly believe that an increased focus on fascia is the direction we're heading to in both the physical healing world, but also in the mental and emotional side as well. In this episode, you'll learn about proper breathing. If you'd like to start some simple breath practices right away, head over and grab my Breathing for Nervous System Regulation ebook at rebelhealth co Breathing. Now let's jump into a fascinating conversation about fascia with Deanna. And we're live. Hey Deanna, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, this is an exciting topic and one that has kind of grown in my own interest field over the last several years and we're going to be talking about fascia and there might be some people out there who know what we're talking about. There might be others who this is one of the first times that they've heard about it outside of maybe that painful thing they see at the gym occasionally. So I'd like to get started just by asking you how you came to be so focused on this topic of fascia, which I'm happy that you are, and I think a lot more people need to be. But what was your kind of journey to get where you're at right now?

So I'm 55 years old now. So 30 years ago, I certified as an athletic therapist here in Canada. And my approach to working on patients was deep tissue work. Even though we had a number of different modalities that we were trained in. And I had very strong hands and I was able to detect protect scar tissue very well. So I had a very successful practice. However, my own personal body was not succumbing to all of the efforts that I was putting in to try to be healthy. I was 50 pounds overweight, struggling with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and the harder that I was working in the gym, the worse I was getting. I was compressing my body with such force every single day in the attempts to turn it into something that I would be really excited and happy with. And yet I was failing miserably at that. So by the age of 30, I made some big changes in my life. And as a result of those changes, I started having severe anxiety attacks. But this one attack in particular was the seed of everything to come. In that moment, I actually thought I was going to die because I was literally frozen, locked in fear. For some reason, though, I dove my hand into my abdomen, which I never, ever touched because that's where I carried the majority of my weight. I was very ashamed of it. I hated it. So now I'm diving my hand in there and the first thing I encounter is pain. But the pain brought me out of my crazy thinking, and I was like, okay, I'm going to live another day. But what I continued to do was just intuitively explore through the tissue. And what was fascinating was it was marbled with what felt like scar tissue, even though I hadn't had any injury or surgery in that area, suddenly I had all of these aha moments. Like, no wonder when I'm coming home from a five mile run dripping wet with sweat, my belly still feels cold. Now, at a similar time, I had also started the practice of yoga. And one of the prompts that they would do every 30 or 45 seconds was to remind us to breathe. And every time I was reminded to breathe I recognized I was holding my breath to some degree. So suddenly all of this information started unraveling in my mind. And then I was working through my own tissue for about 30 to 45 minutes that first evening and felt very calm, which was totally not my normal. Woke up the next day a little tender in the belly. But I'm working on my patients all day, and I'm still really calm. So now I'm super excited to go home the next evening and work on myself again. And after the second night of the same work, when I stood up, I felt taller. I went and I looked at myself in the mirror, and my belly was flatter than it had been in years. So this became my new practice. I would come home and I would work in this tissue. And I was having remarkable progress with my chronic pain, my depression. I was getting excited about life. Life. So within about two weeks, I started flipping my patients onto their back. I started working in their belly in a similar way, and I started having tremendous success with them. So that was 25 years ago, and along the way, as I was becoming known in Winnipeg, that I was doing some pretty amazing work. I started attracting other therapists to learn what I was doing. And it was about two years in when someone said, you really need to be teaching this. And up until that moment, it was a very intuitive exploration. But then I really started to pay attention to what my hands were doing, the path that was they were taking. And I recognized they were actually following the Fibonacci sequence, that spiral pattern of everything in nature, deep into the tissue. And then as I continued to explore and understand a little more, I recognized that I was actually targeting this tissue that we call fascia. And fascia really is such a beautiful, unrecognized tissue. Now the world is certainly starting to wake up to it. But it's literally the cell membrane of every other cell interconnecting every cell. So it becomes this communication system through the entire body.

Hold on, can you say that one more time?

Yes. The cell membrane of every cell is connected to every other cell through this fascia system, which is a communication system. Every cell.

So everywhere. It's not just in muscle, for example, because I think people equate fascia with muscle, or maybe like that painful spot on their calf if they get a massage of equate it. Or if you're eating. If somebody eats meat and they get the. That, like, sheath that's kind of on things or whatever. But you're saying it's every cell in every tissue throughout the whole Thing, the thing being you is connected via fascia. Even in non muscle tissue, even in.

Bone, it's all fascia. Yes. So Gil Headley back In I think 2007 did a fantastic video called the Fuzz speech. And the fuzz being the adhesions in the body. And he's talking with cadavers. So I actually interviewed Gil a couple of years ago. And so this is now 2022, so he has continued to dive in and understand more about the fascia through his work. And he starts talking about a layer of fascia that he uncovered, which he calls the perifascia. And I said, wow, that's the tissue that we're actually working in. So there's different layers of fascia, but ultimately it is now known that it is really the connector of every single cell in the body. And this has huge impact when we can understand that we are a container with parts, but we are also a fluid matrix where everything is interconnected. So this brings a lot of understanding into chronic pain. For example, issues with managing our size and shape, dealing with trauma that gets stuck, stored in the body because there's cause sites to the pain that get trapped in the fascia. So if I may just dive in a little bit more about fascia.

Sure, sure.

So fascia is primarily a combination between collagen and elastin. These two proteins, when they're balanced, the body has structure, but it also has mobility. What happens over time though, is as we start succumbing to the force of gravity, we start basically becoming shorter and wider, but we don't compress linearly. We spiral down in one direction or another because we're dominant on one side and for a number of other reasons. So what is happening to this fascia balance is the collagen starts to migrate. So if I'm sitting in front of a computer for decades, slouched forward, leaning over a little bit to the left because I'm right handed, which is a very typical posture, the collagen component starts to migrate to create false walls and false floors. So I don't literally land flat on my face. But now these adhesions, which is basically the collagen, they act like scar tissue, which is also collagen. So that blocks blood and oxygen flow to cells as well as stops the ability for waste to be effectively removed from the cells and the tissue in general. So over time, the cells become hungry and dirty and space is what becomes the problem when we have that perfect balance of those proteins. One of the functions of the fascia is to ensure that our cells have optimal space in and around the cell. Because if there's space, there's ease of flow, but with gravity constantly pulling us down and unconscious living, we start spiraling down. And then we develop these adhesions that fuzz throughout the body, which again, acts like scar tissue, impeding flow. And the less flow we have, the less our cells are actually functioning on our behalf and the dirtier and more stagnant our body becomes, which attracts disease in the body.

That is pretty wild. And if I hadn't heard it before, I would be asking you a bunch of shocked questions. But it is, I think, something that people don't know anything about. And we were talking before we came on that I have a master's degree in exercise physiolog physiology, something that definitely someone who definitely should have received an education on fascia. Now you're talking about it on cellular level, on organ. I mean, function a lot beyond exercise. But I think the gateway, like you were in physical work, I think the gateway to fascia, or where most people equate fascia, or where you would learn about fascia would be in a physiology program. And we learned that fascia is. Is a thing and that it's involved in scarring. That was pretty much the extent of what I learned in a master's program in exercise physiology about fascia. It wasn't until I started to meet people who were doing a lot deeper work that it even ever came up. And so I think a lot of people, especially in the chronic disease or chronic symptoms, a lot of the audience in like a functional medicine type of circle, even if they're familiar with fascia or what it is or that it's even a thing, may not have any idea that fascia could have a role in so many things you just mentioned, or that it connects even within bones or within organs or within tissues. So you're talking about kind of structural imbalances or postural imbalances. But like, how does this show up? If it goes through every cell that includes organs, that includes different body systems. So you're talk about a cellular level here, that the cells have less flow, there's less. They're hungry and dirty, there's less food to them getting in, there's not cleaning going out. How does that impact. You could pick an organ or talk about organs in general or bodily function that I think most people, even practitioners who listen to this, would never equate fascia with that thing.

Yes, absolutely.

Great.

I'm just going to quickly talk about the three pillars of fascia decompression. So basically over time we compress. That's really what aging is, is we become shorter and wider and eventually we strangle the life from the cells until there's not enough life left in us to survive. So our work is all about putting the space back into the body that time has taken away. So the very first pillar is the creating space component. So when we have fallen out of alignment and we are riddled with scar tissue and adhesions, our body becomes colder in general. And part of the reason for this is the second pillar which is all about inflating space. I'm just going to tip my camera down for a moment because this is really important and impactful. So the diaphragm muscle is the foundation of the rib cage. When we inhale, this muscle moves down. When we exhale, it lifts. And if it's functioning properly, it is giving all of the organs, the heart and the lungs, a continual massage. Now the challenge is pain, fear and stress cause us to reactively hold the breath. We're still going to breathe though, because we're designed to survive. But what happens is we start breathing through the secondary muscles of the upper chest. And over time, as this becomes the habit now this foundation that's not working becomes weakened. So what occurs as a result of that is we start falling in to our core space. So the weight of everything above comes crashing down into this core space, causing first of all a ballooning of the belly. So people think, why is it when I'm maybe over 40, I haven't changed my lifestyle, but now I'm getting a spare tire, I'm starting to put on a little bit of weight. What's actually changed? What's changed is we've started to collapse into the space inside the body, creating congestion and again those cells being starving. So now think about the stomach organ right here. How many people have gut health issues? So here's your stomach organ. Most people are right handed, so this becomes the fallout posture of a lot of people. So if again you imagine what's going on in this space when I have all of this collapsing, now I'm not getting proper flow into this organ and I can also end up with leaky gut because over time, like blowing up a balloon, so many times, the lining becomes weak and it starts to crack. So here's leaky gut. Even imagine the, your heart is around here. So now you've got the aorta, the main artery, leaving the heart to supply the entire body with blood. If I'M sitting this way now. I've taken this roadway and I've compressed it and twist it. So now the heart has to work that much harder. The liver right here. Fatty liver disease is on the rise. Butter at room temperature is a solid. You heat it up, it's a liquid. If we're not breathing with this muscle now, we're not getting that activity to create a heating of this organ. And then we're also displaced as we're doing this. So now the organ becomes colder, and then the fat becomes solid and becomes clogging the filter. So now the liver can't do its many jobs. And so on and so on. And then really from the perspective also of size and shape, when we collapse, of course, the tissue has to go somewhere, so it's going to balloon outward. And then if we're not working our organs properly, we're not absorbing nutrients well. We're also not eliminating well. So then we get a backup of waste that attracts other creatures to come and invade our space. That creates. Creates havoc in the gut, which affects the brain, and so on and so on. So it's when we can really understand the significance of proper diaphragmatic breathing. That's really one of the major foundations. And we can feed the body up to six times the oxygen when we breathe diaphragmatically. 600% more, which is crazy to consider. And it's not because we're pulling more air into the lungs. It's because we're directing the air to the base of the lungs, where the majority of the oxygen receptor sites reside. They've also proven that 84% of weight loss comes through proper exhalation. So for me, back in my 20s, when I'm working out like a fiend and I'm sweating like crazy and I'm getting bigger, and I was like, why are the rules of weight loss not applying to Deanna? I recognized my yoga class. I'm not breathing. And so that was a big awakening for me to understand how to create change in my body. And then the third pillar is maintaining that space. We don't want to do all of this work and then simply fall back into those negative patterns of posture. We are like a building. We have foundations built inside our body, but if we're not aware of them, then we let gravity basically direct how we go through time where we can actually undo that and bring life and space back into the body and have a completely different path of aging.

Amazing. 600% is a big difference in breathing and the way that the Cascade. Like it's a cascade. It's a. This happens. So this happens to this. And I think a lot of people can kind of identify with the signs and symptoms that you're mentioning. And I, over the last few years, completed a pretty extensive four or five hundred hours in a certain form of breath work that involves two, actually, that there's a lot of talk about diaphragmatic breathing. And I did learn that the base of the lungs has a lot of the receptors for the oxygen. So if you're only breathing into the upper part, which I've found that if I don't cue people and I tell them just to take a deep breath, most people, I'm not going to throw out some random percentage. I'll just say most, most people, the first thing that you see is the breath goes in their mouth and their shoulders go up. Yeah, just like that. And for the people that don't have video, she just demonstrated. And that's. I'm not judging, I'm not attacking anybody. There's a lot of reasons for that that we're not going to get into in this, in this conversation, but there's a lot of reasons that that happens. And people are shocked when I point it out to them because they don't even realize it. And then we work on simply just teaching them how physiologically to breathe properly. People want to come and do breath work. They want to do this big thing and go crazy and have all these. And none of that's going to matter how fast or how big or how heavy you can go if you're breathing improperly from the get go. And so a lot of people have to actually retrain the way that they breathe from square one. And it's, you know, and everyone always said, we'll just watch a baby. Well, we had a baby a little over a year ago. Since I did that training, I was like, I'm going to watch him. And 100% of the time he breathes in and out of his nose and his belly rises and falls with each breath. And he's not doing that on purpose. So somewhere along the line we unlearn that and our physiology changes and we start to breathe a different way. And I just, I love the way that you pointed out the cascade and the steps of creating the space, inflating the space, maintaining the space. And so I guess I would ask next, like, what, how, how do you do any of that? And so where does that start? I think most people's idea of how to work with fascia, if they have any is the foam roller. And so which got. I don't know, that thing was like a fringe tool when I, when I was a trainer about 15 years ago, I was like one of the weird trainers who even was using that or the ball or any of those things. But I think the foam roller is pretty, I think it's pretty popular now. I think most people have, have knowledge of it. They probably avoid it because it doesn't feel awesome to do it on certain parts of their body. But I guess. Where to. What does this look like? We've talked about it. Theoretically. What does it look like to actually do?

So I think just before that, if I may, the first thing to understand is adhesions are going to grip into everything in its path, including bone, with a force of up to £2,000 per square inch. But it's a magnetic force. So the part about the breath work, first of all, if we have been in this alignment for decades, our diaphragm is literally in a freeze mode. And simply to do breath work isn't going to unlock that 2,000 pound per square inch seal. What we do is we always start in the core and the rib cage to release those ribs, the fascia that's binding the ribs, holding the diaphragm from function so that we can open it up and have more of the diaphragm to work on our behalf. And the thing about it is, it's a magnetic seal. So if you imagine magnets far enough apart, they have no attraction toward each other. Bring them closer together and they seal with the force. Now try to pull this apart. Pretty impossible, but you can shear. So what we do is our tools are made of wood. The reason being is because bone and wood are similar in density and when we're in a position, we're not moving on the surface.

Is that true?

We're staying at one. Yes. Yes.

I've never heard that before. That's really cool.

Yeah. So if you're using a fascia roller that's porous and you're rolling ocean, we want a deep sea dive because we need to get to the bone. That's the root of the problem. We are literally again, 2,000 pounds per square inch held in that magnetic seal. So what we do is we work with the tool in positions all over the body, but we always start in the belly. Our very first position we always do is right on the belly button. We lie on it and we teach you that this is where we should be breathing from, because we need a prop. If we've been breathing through these muscles for decades, the muscles of the upper chest, to suddenly turn it on and be able to breathe diaphragmatically. It does take a little bit of training, but we make it really simple for people using this prop. And then we work through the ribs. So if I'm going to be working the area of the liver, this would be one of the positions, or we can even do it on the side. And we stay for a minimum of three minutes in each position because pressure over time creates heat. So on the external body we use the tool and then when we turn on the diaphragm, that's like your body's furnace. The muscles of the upper chest, that fallout mechanism for breathing is like a space heater. I live in a 30 story building and in the winter it can be minus 35 Celsius here. And if I have one space heater, I can only heat one room. Turn on the building's furnace, you heat the entire building. So when we start breathing diaphragmatically, we are more effectively heating the body. So then combining that with any position that we're doing now, we're heating from the inside and the outside, which becomes a very efficient form of melting through those adhesions. And then when you're in position, we teach you how to slowly move within the layers of fascia to get that shearing effect. And your breath is your guide. So people are always like, wow, like it sounds like it would be painful, but the pressure fibers in the body are larger in diameter than the pain fibers. So when we get into a position and you're in control and you're prompted how to breathe, those pressure fibers kick in and then it starts to feel like good pain. And then we teach you how to search for pain, because essentially pain is the cell giving you information that it's not getting what it needs. Oxygen, nutrients, or maybe it's dirty and stagnant or dehydrated. Whatever it is, the cell is giving you information through pain, through anxiety, through all the negative symptoms. It's just the cell speaking to you, saying, hey, mom or dad, you're asking me to do a job, but you're not giving me what I need to perform well. So I'm giving you some insight. I used to say I have anxiety, but what I've now learned is if I'm feeling anxious, I know that my cells aren't receiving the love, the energy, the nutrients that they require to do their job properly. So it's the baby crying, we wouldn't throw the baby crying over in the corner. We would pick up that baby and we would hold it. So we teach you how to become pain seekers, because pain is simply the cell saying, hey, I need a little love and attention. Open me up, give me some more oxygen, and exhale. All of the stuff, the waste, the negative emotion that's been stuck and trapped out of the body through this beautiful mechanism of the diaphragm.

Wow. Okay. And thank you. That was very clear. And the stuff you're explaining is quite complex, and you do a very good job of making it easy to follow. So, I mean, it can be. I'm sure this could be talked about on a level that everybody would glaze over. So you're doing a very good job of teaching it in a way that's easy to follow. And there's two things you mentioned there. One is cold. Two are emotions. So I'm curious. A lot of people, especially women, talk about being cold all the time. And I don't think I've ever heard before. So I'm guessing most of them have probably not ever heard before that it can be fascial adhesions and issues with the fascia that are leading to. You mentioned your belly was cold, and I've actually noticed that before, too. Like, I don't. I'll put in quotes. Retired right now. But I used to box, and I did a lot of pretty intense training for that. And I would notice that even when I was all sweaty and my face was hot and I'm sweating, that the sweat on my belly would feel like my belly would feel cold like always. And it never made any sense to me, and I never met anyone who could explain it to me. And I always just chalked it up to my body's weird. So I just wanted to point that out, that I have personal experience with probably this and that, the cold, that somebody runs cold. This is definitely something to consider. And obviously you have other things to look at. We have circulation things, we have thyroid things, but this is probably not on anybody's radar. And then you mentioned emotions and stress. And I've been taught how emotions and trauma can wind up causing blocked flow and stagnation. And I don't know if the word adhesions have been used, but I know that what they're talking about is fascia, but they don't often describe it in that way, depending on the school in which is speaking. So can you talk to that at all about emotions or, like, specifically? Because I think our audience. We have those kind of other side Conversations on this podcast sometimes. So I think that weaving that in here would kind of paint like a really well connected picture.

Absolutely. So pain, fear and stress cause us to reactively hold the breath. So let's imagine you're 10 years old and you experience some traumatic events. The very first thing that we're going to do with that trauma is we're going to pull ourselves in. We're going to keep this very open, vulnerable space protected. So we hold the breath. Now, a deer who survives an attack will shake, moving out that negative energy in the moment where we as humans, we hold the breath. And then often we stay in that freeze state. So now, again, if we really look at this mechanism, when this muscle is working properly, it's moving up and down and we need space for this muscle to work. So now I have an event. Hit me, I recoil this way. And if I don't let that go now I'm breathing from this place. So now my diaphragm is very impacted as I'm going through time. So if that happened when I'm 10 years old and I'm still developing, my development will be impeded because most importantly, cells need oxygen to do every function. And if we're limited in how much we're breathing, especially as we're developing, that's going to impact how we develop. And then we end up with things down the road, maybe autoimmune disease or whatever it may be, but it's all tied and held in where the breath is driving us from. And I just want to tap in because this might give another interesting bit of clarity, because you were saying how your baby is breathing through the belly, which is beautiful to hear because I'm now seeing that there's a lot of babies that aren't breathing through their belly. I'm seeing a ton of issues because mothers today are very different than the older generations. You know, my mother, for example, again, I'm 55. She didn't grow up in front of technology. I've heard that since the 50s, there's 144,000 more toxins in the world. We have EMFs. I mean, the whole thing, like the world is so completely different. So now you have the mother who's very stressed in comparison likely to the past. And in yoga, they say we're born with a signature posture. And the goal of this lifetime is to break through that signature posture. The way I interpret that is we are born with our mother's breath. So if we are coming out breathing in that stressed way, then life starts afflicting us from that moment going forward. So we're going to be seeing a lot of trauma, and we already are seeing a lot of trauma in the younger population. But this is a very accessible process to unlock what time before had done to release the adhesions that are now holding you in those negative alignments that are basically keeping you safe and supported. But it should have only been for a moment. We should be like the deer, where after the trauma, we let it go so we don't keep those emotions inside that keep attracting more and more and more of that negativity because we're magnetic beings. So if I'm holding all that fear in, then, and I'm emitting that fear and then I'm attracting more of that fear, if I can't release my anger, I'm going to continue to create opportunities for me to be angry and then I'm going to blow one day. Or you know, that that's how it happens because we get too much of a charge inside of us. So to be properly regulated, we need to again, move the energy out of the body through that proper exhale. But when we go into freeze mode, we lock it and store it all inside of the body.

Thank you for that explanation. And that's really fascinating and troubling to hear about what is being seen with the little ones. But, yeah, then we're pretty lucky because he's breathing pretty optimally from what I've been able to see. And it's one way that, you know, intergenerational things are passed down then because we know so many others, like genetically and everything else. So it's just really interesting to see them all kind of the confluence of understanding that we seem to be gaining at the same time about how that works. I think one thing that we had chatted about earlier that we haven't talked about much in this because you focused on the diaphragm a lot and a few other things, but we haven't mentioned the feet or the hands. And you talk a lot about the feet when teaching and I'm curious. I have noticed as of late, I'm 44 now. This is recent, in the last few years. But when I have poor sleep or I have high stress or periods of a lot of travel or something else that's really stressful, I notice my hands and feet don't feel. I'll just say great, that there's a little bit of tenseness or tightness or quasi arthritis if it's joints, but it doesn't always feel like it's. Joints, it just feels like they're kind of unhappy. So I'm curious if you could share a little bit how the feet and the hands, what that has to do with fascia and overall health.

Absolutely. So the diaphragm is in the center of the body. The feet and the hands are the furthest from the diaphragm. So if we're breathing properly all the time, 24 7, we're moving the energy, the fluids, the blood, the oxygen throughout the entire body. So all cells are getting the blood flow. Blood flow is what keeps the body heated. As soon as we start decreasing in the flow, when we have circulation problems, that's when we start feeling cold hands and feet. So when I look at a body, if I'm doing an assessment, I always want to see what's causing the pain because there's cause sites to our pain. And so whenever I look at a body standing, you're always going to see one foot that's acting like a flat tire. It's driving away from the body. And then if we don't have a counter to that, we'll end up landing on our face. So the opposite side of the body ends up anchoring. So if my feet are in correct alignment, they are directly below my hip joints. As soon as my feet start splaying away, now that's affecting what's going on in the hip joints. So now that's creating compression in the pelvis. It's causing the rib cage to get pulled forward and down. And now we're again blocking that whole abdominal space, not able to breathe properly. Hands are very similar as well because again, furthest from the engine. And if you look at a skeleton properly aligned palms are forward. If you look at pretty much anybody walking around, they're walking around with the palms facing behind them. And that's partly because as the rib cage collapses forward, we end up with this internal rotation of the arm, causing that to happen. And now we're blocking flow in this space. So if I've got proper alignment, I've got optimal flow into my arms and my hands. Similarly, if I have optimal alignment in my pelvis and my legs, I have optimal flow down into my feet as soon as I shift out of alignment. Now I'm basically squeezing the life out of the hips and the shoulders, blocking blood flow to the limbs. So for example, if I have a frozen shoulder and I go for a treatment and they work on my shoulder, I might feel good for a moment. But as soon as I start walking, I'm going To get pulled right back into that negative pattern that's going to be largely responsible for the frozen shoulder in the first place, which will be at your foundation. So I can just quickly share here a very simple exercise everybody can start with immediately that will begin to make a difference in your fascia and in the whole energy of your body. If you take either your finger or a pencil and for three minutes, put pressure between each toe and you'll feel it. It hurts and you want to feel that pain, but your breath is your guide. So as long as you're breathing in a relaxed way, you're feeding and healing. If it hurts so much that it's causing stress, breath, that's your body saying, this is too intense. So putting pressure between each toe for three minutes is going to re pattern the alignment of the toes, because they're like the eyes of the feet. So if you've got some toes that are overlapping or curled or twisted or hammer toes, now you're not walking with a proper gait, and your gait is going to affect what's going on up the chain. So we want to re pattern the feet and then bring them back into alignment. And after you've worked the toes and you can do it sitting, watching a TV show or something, then after you want to stand with your feet under your hips, knees slightly bent, and you want to grip the toes for 10 breaths. And that's like pumping up the tires of a car. So if you have a flat tire in the front right of the car, the car gets drawn into that side. We want balance. And that comes through understanding how to do that for the feet and then for the hands, really simply, you can place between your thumb and index finger. You can just put pressure. Now I would bring your hands, maybe belly button height, so your shoulders can be relaxed. But put pressure in for three minutes, then go between the second and third, then between the third and the fourth. For me, this one is the most painful. And then between the fourth and the fifth, and again, that starts to re pattern the fingers. So if you have arthritis in the fingers, if you have carpal tunnel dupytron contracture, this is really going to help to re pattern how your hands work. And then you'll notice when you finish doing that, that when you stand up, your arms hang more comfortably by your sides. Because as soon as we internally rotate, it creates the elevation of the shoulders, the shoulder blades start migrating. That puts immense pressure on the rib cage. Now we come crashing down into the core. So everything is connected. But looking at the limbs I always say that the limbs are the puppet masters of the core, which is really important for people with scoliosis to understand because if you just go and you have your spine addressed, you start walking and you're going to continue to get pulled out into that negative alignment.

Yeah. Something brought it there in the first place. It didn't do it itself. So that's really, really fascinating. And if somebody can do the toes like she did the fingers, I'll be impressed with your feet together. But that's really interesting. How do you feel about toe spacers or like, do you know those?

Yeah, but they're not going to melt.

No, it doesn't make the pressure there. I just noticed when I used those, I noticed more now. I'm way more in tune now with my body and subtle things than I was before. But I noticed just using those, which doesn't do the same thing with the fascia, that I stood differently after using them. Even though the point of them, or at least how they're marketed, is just for your feet. I noticed a different floor up kind of thing. And so it's interesting that. And the posture that you mentioned I used to do, I was a corrective exercise specialist, so I. Which still didn't teach me about fascia, which is so fascinating. But that postural thing with the hands facing the wrong way, that was kind of like a really easy, simple thing to look at on somebody really fast when they weren't paying attention, when you hadn't cued them to do anything. And I mean, where I was, I would say at least 80% of the people, and these were people in gyms, not necessarily athletes, but they were people who did work out and people who were kind of on that journey. I'd say at least 80% of them, their palms faced backwards.

Yeah.

And now good would be palms neutral, like facing the body. That's like. If somebody has that, it's like, wow, you really are taking care of yourself. And you've really been good with your posture. And that's true with the skeletons. The palms always face forward. And I think if we were in a natural position, it would be the other way around. So I can feel everybody at home right now checking themselves and pulling their shoulders. But I bet people do that when they're talking to you all the time. Straighten themselves up, pull the shoulders back, puff the chest out a little. Yeah. Do the posture thing. It's like behaving when the teacher's in the room.

Just to help people too, when they're seated is if we pull the legs like, you know how lots of people pull them under the chair, hook them around the chair. We want to have our knees 90 degrees and we want to have our feet planted firmly on the ground so that we've got equal weight on both sit bones. If you can just notice like where's your weight? Are you leaning more to the left or to the right? If you're leaning more to the left, you're going to develop more adhesions on the left and similarly on the right. So if we can maintain a balanced structure, then we develop less adhesions through the day to have to deal with so that we can start making way more gains just through understanding how to support ourselves properly. Even the tongue muscle is one of the foundations we really teach people to understand. Your thyroid is right here. And if you've got a, a weak tongue, people think a double chin is a fat chin. It's actually a weak displaced tongue which then puts tremendous pressure on your thyroid gland. And then if you also notice, most people sit with a head tilt one way or the other. So you've got a head forward, you've got a head tilt. Now we're squeezing and impacting this beautiful butterfly shaped gland in the neck, creating a lack of flow and stagnancy in that which is going to impact its ability to do its job properly.

It makes a lot of sense. And I've had an elevated shoulder, my left shoulder, and I'm right handed forever. I've noticed it in photographs since probably high school basketball pictures. And I always thought it was from having my left hand on the steering wheel and my right hand screwing around with whatever thing on the, either the gear or the shifter or the radio or the something and then sitting in a way. But I noticed that I had it soon after I noticed it right when I started driving. And I think doing that it would take time for it to. If the driving was the driver behind it, I think it would take more than a month or two to create that imbalanced posture.

It's amazing how quickly though those habits will add up. It's what we do all the time that people matters most that causes us to end up where we are. But that right, if you're right handed, very likely that right foot is the driver. And then as that pulls the body away, it creates a turning and then an anchoring. So that becomes a very common posture that we see is that right shoulder's down left.

If I'm not conscious of it, if I'm just standing, it's Usually like a solid inch, like in photographs. It's very noticeable. It always looks like I'm sitting with one shoulder elevated, not sitting. It doesn't do it when I'm sitting, but if I'm standing, it always looks like I'm intentionally lifting up my. Shrugging my left shoulder. And I caught something very early. You said in this interview around the diaphragm and a chain reaction. And I took my own little notes there. So it looks like I need to do some fascial work. I just want to share a little anecdotal thing, if that's okay. I had my first massage earlier this year where I allowed pretty significant abdominal massage with a massage therapist that I was in Poland at one of the eight day trainings in the breath work that I work with. And she was there as support for us as we were going through it. She was providing bodywork and she's trained in multiple types of body work and in the breath work and in everything else we were doing. And I, I laid down on the table and SHE SPEAKS POLISH I don't speak Polish. So it was a very interesting back and forth and she pointed at my belly and she said, I must do this. Yes. And I was like, because it's a really vulnerable thing. You mentioned it when you started doing it, that this is not a normal place for people to start digging their hands into their body as their belly for a lot of reasons. It can be insecure, it can be hiding, it can it evolutionarily. This is a very dangerous place to let people touch. We keep it guarded, we keep it crunched, we keep it protected, we stay round like a million reasons why. My first reaction to her digging her hands into my belly was like, yeah, not so sure about that actually. And she said, trust? Yes. And I was like, yeah. I've known her for a while. I've been there twice. I've spent a couple weeks with her. I was like, okay. She says, okay, good, and pats me on the head. And then she says, do not stop breathe. And I said, okay. And so she went into my belly for about, probably about 70 minutes. And there were points of it where I. It was like right on that you just said, if you can maintain your breathing, it's okay, but if it causes you to go into stress breathing, it's too much, whatever that line was. I was at it for a while and I trusted her, so I let her go. It was not comfortable, it was not easy, it was not the most enjoyable massage that I've ever had. But I can say when I got up and when I walked back to my room and it was late in the evening so I was going to bed. I've never noticed more of a. I don't know what to call it, full self difference in how I felt. Not necessarily like, oh, my muscles feel so relaxed all over my body. Like I felt like a different person. Like I felt I floated one to my room and people were talking to me and I was just like, what? Huh? And I couldn't even really like, it almost felt intoxicating. But also I felt emotionally and mentally like a different person. More so than any body work I've ever had done, ever. And when you were talking about it at the beginning, you were talking about digging into your belly and you were having these, like, I don't know, things you were figuring out and things you were feeling and et cetera. There was so much more to it than the physical discomfort or pain that was going along with the, with the massage that the next morning I woke up and I was like a evangelical for belly massages and everyone needs to go see Ella and get her hands in their belly. And I couldn't even explain why. Now this probably. I see you're like smiling and nodding while I'm telling this. This is probably not that uncommon of an experience of skilled abdominal massage and fascial release, right?

Correct. Yeah. I teach my own form of, I call it fluid isometrics. Block therapy is the self care version of fluid isometrics. And one of the big things is when we start tapping into that diaphragmatic breath takes your brain frequency to the relaxed state. Breathing up through here keeps your brain frequency in a stress state. So you're thinking of future and past, which is where fear lives because it's not real. When we're breathing diaphragmatically, we're living in the moment it turns on the vagus nerve, our parasympathetic system is turned on where we can then heal and rest. Most people are in sympathetic 100% of their day. We should be in parasympathetic 80% of our day. So to be able to really understand how to navigate that, that is a game changer for again, how you approach illness, disease, injury, all of it.

Yeah, it was, I've done a lot of stuff. Like I've done a lot of body things, I've done a lot of mental, emotional things. I've done a lot of different. And it was, it was one of the more profound experiences that I'd had having like a Full hour of a Polish magician digging in my, my belly. And I tried to tell her the next day the best I could with someone in between us and me talking to her. She got it and she laughed and she said, yes, of course, of course you feel this way. And she said, more, you need more. There needs to be more of this, because one time isn't going to completely change everything for good. So, anyways, sorry, I'm just fascinated by this and I want people to really consider this because I think that for a lot of people in the chronic condition, chronic symptom, chronic disease world, they've tried all the things they've done, the supplements they've done, the diets they've done, the lifestyle modifications, the protocols. And what I'm really trying to do with this podcast is help them find stuff that they haven't considered, that they haven't done, that they haven't thought about, that hasn't been on their radar, that their practitioner doesn't know about. Because all it takes is hearing the right, right thing and it gives them this idea and it can really be a game changer and a shift for people. And I heard at least a dozen ways that you shared in this interview that focusing on one's fascia could impact them in ways that they would not have thought or considered. This is not just for athletes. This is not just for people with tight, like, oh, I have a tight hamstring. And so I'm just really excited that you're doing this work. So if you want to just share where, if somebody is as interested in this as I am, where do they go right now to kind of check out more, get their toe in the water, get started.

So My website is blocktherapy.com and I have a starter program that includes both the tools. You can either get one or the other. And it's explained if you're over five feet, you want the bigger tool under five feet. But if you can get both tools, we have actually double blocking classes in our membership and there's multiple uses for both size tools, no matter where you, you're coming from. So that's one place. And then if I may share another place that I absolutely love, it's our private Facebook community, Block Therapy community. There's over 16,000 members in there. And the reason I love this place is because when you start understanding fascia, it's everything. Every cell in your body is connected through the system. So every issue in your body will in part be a result of fascia. We are a structural being. If we don't keep our structure aligned, then we're squishing things, and then they simply don't work. It's really that simple. So what's beautiful about that community is you have people from all walks of life that have used this work to get themselves to the other side. So whether It's Parkinson's disease, MS, managing size and shape, chronic pain, acute injury, trauma, all of that, you can ask questions to the community, and then you're getting the people doing the work that are on the other side or managing their issues with this to also respond and to give that wealth of information which is so important. It's one thing for me to say, yes, this will do all of these things, but when you actually have people that have walked the path, it's a very, very beautiful, supportive way to approach your body and have that community support.

Amazing. And, yeah, go check it out. For real. This is. And, and, and I love that you've found tools that can. That can help a lot, because after that experience, I was kind of deflated and I was like, well, I guess I got to go to Poland all the time. And that's. That's not the easiest thing to do. So you found that there's self ways to do this. So, Deanna, thank you for sharing. I had a lot of other stuff. We're already at time, so maybe we'll have you back for a part two in the future. But I. I appreciate you sharing here and for the work that you're doing and again, explaining something that can be a little complex and difficult in a way that I think everybody can understand, and everybody will be better off for it. So check out her site. We'll have all the links in the show notes, and if there's anything else we talked about, we'll throw it in there too, so you can find it. And just. Thank you.

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, Michael.