THE ACCRESCENT™ PODCAST EPISODE 211

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:00.716)
Well, Lindsay, welcome back to the Accrescent Podcast.

Lindsay Courcelle (00:03.761)
Thank you so much for having me. I loved talking with you the first time and I’m excited to talk more today.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:09.198)
I’m so excited to have you back because I wanted our first conversation, which I’ll make sure is linked in the show notes to be helping us get a general understanding of fascia myofascial release. So I don’t think we’re gonna, I don’t think we need to go over all the basics again. I’ll direct people to go listen to that first conversation. But I wanted to have that conversation that way we could have this follow up talk about fascia and breast health very, very specifically.

And as we were kind of talking about off air, talking about how fascia can contribute to experiences of breast cancer and what we can do in preventative proactive ways, but then also understanding how some of the things we might experience during breast cancer can leave long-term impact and then what we can do kind of on the other side of it to support fascia repair, et cetera. So I’m excited to be able to dive into all of that.

Lindsay Courcelle (01:03.356)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:05.886)
Maybe a starting point, and of course there’s probably, not probably, there is a lot I don’t know about this. So if there’s like a really important question I’m not asking, just jump in and go, hey, here’s a facet we need to make sure we talk about. But I think maybe just a starting point is how does fascia contribute to general breast health, breast wellness?

Lindsay Courcelle (01:26.457)
Yeah, that’s a great question. I won’t give my whole spiel on fascia, but it is this head to toe web of connective tissue. what they are finding more and more is that this extracellular matrix, the space around each cell, that is fascia. And it’s really, really important for healthy cells that we have that fascia being fluid and dynamic and able to

anytime that there’s any sort of solidification that it’s able to then revert back to its more fluid state. And so when I think of breast health in general, or just body health really, I just think that keeping our fascia fluid and unrestricted, when we have restrictions, getting those restrictions to release and become more fluid again is really like where it’s at. And so thinking of like breast cancer, when we have a fascial restriction,

that restriction can exert this really crushing pressure of up to 2,000 pounds per square inch. So imagine you have breast cells and you have an elephant sitting on them. Like, are those cells going to be able to be healthy? No, they aren’t. And so that’s where that disease comes in is that the cells just aren’t able to do their job the way that they’re meant to do. And so that’s the kind of like very basics of it. And I will say that

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:47.79)
Wow.

Lindsay Courcelle (02:53.242)
I do work a lot with breast health, but I am not an expert on breast cancer. I’m sure you know so much more than I do. And so I can speak to my experience working with breast cancer patients and just women in general. yeah, it’s something that interests me a lot and I’m excited to talk more about it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:11.424)
Yeah, I love that you gave us just that like kind of bird’s eye view of it. Basically, when there’s issues, there’s constriction that’s happening. When that constriction is happening, it’s like 2000 pounds of pressure being put on the cells, is disrupting so many mechanisms that are happening in the cell.

Lindsay Courcelle (03:29.552)
Yes, absolutely.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:31.852)
Okay, so then I think the next place to go to is what are things that can cause constriction in the fascia? And if there are broad ones, but then if there are some that might be more specific to breast fascia constriction.

Lindsay Courcelle (03:38.191)
Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (03:45.349)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so these sorts of restrictions can come from so many different things like any sort of accident or injury, a more physical trauma to the body, even something like a car accident. You know, we don’t think like, I had a car accident and now I have a restriction in my breasts. But I can speak for myself personally, having had a very minor car accident in my, I was, I think, 19 or 20.

and I just was rear ended and ever since then, I think from where the seatbelt went across my chest, I’ve had this little bit of more dense tissue in one of my breasts. And so that’s just to give you this idea that like, it doesn’t have to be an injury specific to the breast. It can be an injury that might be somewhere in the chest, but it could be that it’s some sort of injury to your pelvis. And the way fascia works is that

it really can tug on other parts of your body when it gets restricted because it is this head to toe continuous web without interruption. And so these restrictions, like I said, can come from these physical traumas. They could definitely come from a surgery like a breast surgery, you know, for example, like a, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m struggling with this, but a reduction. implants or a breast reduction, something like that, or even like a

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:02.126)
of an implant or a reduction.

Lindsay Courcelle (05:09.444)
a heart surgery, just something where there’s scar tissue anywhere in the body, even something like having a gallbladder removed and having surgical scars kind of in the upper abdomen. All of those can kind of tug into the breasts. And then I think the big one is that our fascia holds these traumas and more emotional.

trauma that we have and so when that happens that can also get sort of solidified in our tissue and I know there’s some correlation. I don’t have the studies specifically off the top of my head but it’s like there is a correlation between stressful events a couple years before a breast cancer diagnosis and I don’t know if you know anything about that but that’s something that is real and they’ve found in scientific studies so you know if you think about that it’s like what

I think of it more holistically like what are we holding onto? What kind of pressure are we just feeling on our chest that we can’t let go of? Or like what is weighing down our shoulders, like the weight of the world? All of those sorts of things. And I know from clients I’ve worked with that have ended up with a breast cancer diagnosis, it often has been like they’ve lost someone that they love and there’s this grief that they haven’t been able to process or…

the end of a relationship or a betrayal or just something like that. It could be any sort of emotional kind of wound. So those are kind of the main ones, but really just any physical trauma that you can think of and any emotional trauma in which that emotion is not fully expressed.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:46.026)
Yeah, it’s so interesting because just maybe two, three weeks ago, I gave a presentation on the four ways our body is actually designed to fight cancer and how chronic stress and trauma actually affects biologically all those four mechanisms. You know, it shields cancer cells, it kind of deregulates the immune system, downgrades the immune system. absolutely, like we have so much scientific evidence now showing

Lindsay Courcelle (07:03.516)
That makes so much sense.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (07:15.886)
how stress biologically impacts us. And so I just completely agree. I think still when we talk about emotions and emotional release and processing and how it affects disease, there’s a lot of, there’s an idea that this is just kind of like a woo woo nice sentiment, but it was really fun to be able to actually present some of the data on that related to cancer specifically. So what might be some of the signs? I guess there’s kind of two sides to this. One could be,

knowing that an injury, an accident, some kind of physical trauma, emotional trauma could impact us, that might be something that you just proactively go, I was in a minor accident, I just want to go check in with a facial therapist to make sure things are moving again. But what might be some signs that someone could pinpoint that something is up with the fascia, particularly in their breast tissue? How might they be able to tell?

Lindsay Courcelle (08:07.355)
Yeah. Well, I guess I can say that I don’t have a really solid answer for that in terms of I have never felt someone’s breasts and been able to say like, I think you should get this checked because it’s leading me to think it’s cancerous. But I will say that what can happen is that our tissue can become much more dense and sort of harder. And usually that happens over time to the

to the extent that we don’t even realize it’s happening and suddenly as an maybe older woman you’re feeling your breasts and you’re like, wow, my breasts are kind of dense and I feel like they used to be softer or I feel like they used to be more supple or whatever it is. And our tissue is so dynamic and it can change. So I would say feeling hard, dense breasts, like people get that diagnosis, women get that diagnosis all the time when they go and get a mammogram and they say, you have dense breasts. It’s like, well,

that’s not really ideal. It would be better if there was more fluidity in your breast tissue. So when you have dense breasts, that’s just one sign that things are starting to become a little bit more solid. And our fascia is this in between solid and liquid state of water. So it’s this fourth phase of water. It’s this amazing kind of liquid crystal gel or goo. And so we don’t want…

We don’t want it to feel really dense. We don’t want it to feel solid. We want it to feel more fluid and more supple. And it’s pretty amazing just the myofascial breast care class that I teach. I’ve had women do one hour of work that we do in the class and they’re like, my God, my breasts feel entirely different. And so it really can be so simple to change the kind of quality of our breast tissue.

And certainly if you go to a therapist who works with breasts, like a myofascial release therapist who has a women’s health specialty, they can work with the breasts and make those changes as well. I’ve seen it in lots of my clients where they go and have a mammogram. It comes back with something that’s concerning. They come and see me for one session. They go back for another mammogram or mammogram and then biopsy or mammogram and then ultrasound and they get the mammogram and they’re like, there’s nothing there anymore. So it can be very quick and

Lindsay Courcelle (10:26.555)
I think that’s one of my favorite things about myofascial release for breast care is I know what it’s like to be in that fear state of thinking there’s something wrong with your body as a woman. And so if someone gets that mammogram results where they’re nervous about what’s going on and they can come and see me and then go back and just, it’s all clear as opposed to going back and then they have to do an ultrasound and then they have to do a biopsy and maybe they have to do this.

special biopsy that one of my clients was telling me about where she had to lay face down and they had to use this robot machine under, you know, it was just like very, very intense and they ended up not finding anything. And it’s like, it’s great that we have these diagnostic tools, but they are really not the answer. I think the answer is really maintaining our breast health, if that makes sense.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:17.678)
100%. Okay, this is blowing my mind a little bit though, because I, so I’ve always been told I have very dense breast tissue. And that was sort of portrayed to me as if you’re just either born with dense breast tissue or you’re not. And so you were saying here like, really no one’s tissue should be dense or like that dense.

Lindsay Courcelle (11:40.058)
I think it’s not ideal for it to be really dense. And I think that there’s a range of normal for sure, and that women have dense breasts and they’re still in that range of normal and it’s not necessarily meaning that they’re going to have cancer. But if you can spend a small amount of time working with your breast tissue and then they suddenly aren’t as dense, to me, it makes sense to think that that is what we’re going for. Like we’re going for, there’s no reason to think that having

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:43.362)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:54.017)
Right, right.

Lindsay Courcelle (12:09.407)
less dense, more supple, more fluid breasts is anything but just amazing for our body. It just means the cells can do their jobs. It means our lymph is flowing. Really, everything is flowing. And a lot of women even just tell me they like their breasts more after they do this work. I’ve had women with small breasts tell me they feel like their breasts are more supple. And women with larger breasts tell me that they feel like their breasts are more supple.

and so it’s just really interesting. It’s like it just somehow helps us find this balance in our bodies just by this therapeutic work of our breasts. Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (12:45.613)
Yeah, completely. No, but that’s, it’s, I just love that. And also what a, what a great, easy, simple, free way to experiment with that where, you know, I’ll do your course and do some fascia work on myself and see how that changes. And if nothing changes, maybe it’s like, okay, then maybe this just is how my breasts are. But if something changes, it’s like, okay, wow, there was some fascia congestion or constriction that was happening there.

Lindsay Courcelle (13:14.095)
think almost for sure you would notice some sort of change and it would be positive. And I think it’s really exciting. I just, I mean, we all know what it feels like when you lose a little bit of range of motion in a joint, for example, like when you feel like your neck is stiff or something like that. And so it’s the same with breasts, like just thinking of them being more fluid. We want our body to be more fluid in all the ways. It’s always benefiting us.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:16.867)
I’m totally, %

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:38.399)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Follow-up questions. One is, I think maybe I’ll start here, how, if at all, do bras affect fascia? And do they?

Lindsay Courcelle (13:48.698)
Hmm.

Yeah, they definitely do. I have this reel that I’ve used this audio and I don’t know. it’s from a book. I’ll have to let you know afterwards the name of the book. But it’s like women are three to four times more likely to develop breast cancer if they’re regularly wearing a bra. Don’t quote me on that statistic, but it is like, it is crazy, the statistics. And I can get them to you so that you have them for the show notes.

but it definitely affects the fascia. It affects your lymphatic flow and it just makes everything more congested. So I am always a fan of not wearing a bra, wearing a camisole or something like that, or at least wearing a looser fitting bra. This is a little bit of the tricky thing is like you go to even kind of a fancier lingerie or bra store to get fitted and they fit them very tight.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (14:25.487)
Mm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (14:46.135)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Courcelle (14:46.242)
So it’s not like, I have more money, I’m gonna go buy a fancy bra and they’re gonna give you a bra that’s better for your breast health. No, they’re not. They don’t know anything about it. And so I’m always just a fan of like erring on the side of safety. And I will say it’s been now a couple years that I just don’t wear a bra and I have larger breasts and I wear a camisole under my shirts if I want to not have my nipples showing or something like that.

I love it. I feel so much better. And now when I do wear a bra, it feels really restricting. And that’s, I think most women would have that experience if they gave it a try. Like after a while they’d be like, I can’t believe I did that for so many years.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (15:28.707)
Totally, yeah. I hate having to wear a bra. And it really does, like I feel like it even changes my energy and my stress to some degree. Like I think we all know that feeling when you get home from work and you take your bra off and you’re just like, Like that says a lot.

Lindsay Courcelle (15:45.677)
Yeah, absolutely. And my question to my clients who say this sort of thing to me is like, well, I’ll have women say like, I just can’t take a full breath or I have this pain in my shoulder. And I’m like, well, what if all you had to do was not wear your bra? Like, do you really have to wear a bra? Who’s telling you you have to wear a bra? And just kind of getting into that. I mean, I am not someone who…

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:03.887)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Courcelle (16:10.276)
particularly likes the attention of having my nipples sticking out and having people looking at me. So I tend to want to wear this little camisole or a bralette or something like that, like, there’s no, as I have this almost 10 year old daughter, I’ve had a lot of conversations with her about this, of like, if someone’s looking at your breasts, it’s really on them and not on you, you know? Like you should be comfortable and doing the thing that feels healthy and good for your body and not.

feel like you have to do anything for other people’s comfort.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:41.967)
Yeah, completely. think a little bit about, I mean, I sports bras might be a little bit better, but I played soccer most of my life and every day, hours and hours, I mean, not hours, all day long, because let’s be honest, as an athlete, like going to college classes, I was still dressed in all my soccer years. So all day long wearing a tight sports bra. It’s just something interesting.

Lindsay Courcelle (16:57.593)
Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (17:05.924)
Totally, that makes sense. there are times when it feels better to be supported with a bra for sure, like sports. So I’m not saying there’s never a place, but yeah, like definitely taking it off at night, taking it off as soon as you get home, those sorts of things, and trying to choose ones that are less restricting and just softer in the elastic part, you know? And not underwire, that’s another piece.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:31.147)
Yeah, and I think we, it’s not about, I really prefer to take this approach of, it’s less about identifying these things that we should never ever ever ever do, and more about understanding the impact of certain things, whether that’s food or drinks or substances or bras, whatever it might be. And just when you understand the impact, you can make much more informed decisions. You can also go,

Lindsay Courcelle (17:41.113)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:55.041)
If for whatever reason I’m someone that needs to wear a tight underwire bra every single day, that’s just information for me to go, okay, I maybe need to be more on top of my facial care. To mitigate the impact of that.

Lindsay Courcelle (18:06.297)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think absolutely, 100%.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:12.623)
So another question I want to ask, and maybe you don’t have the answer, but I think it’s worth asking is, first of all, maybe there’s a benign cyst that’s growing in the breast. Maybe it gets all checked out. It’s nothing there. First of all, from what I know and have seen from patients, if it’s not immediately cancerous, most doctors are just going to be like, well, it’s benign. Have a nice life.

Lindsay Courcelle (18:35.556)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:35.619)
There’s not really much else that’s happening, but part of the question I want to ask there is if there is an irregular growth in breast tissue, is that a sign that something is up with the fascia? Basically, if I were to ask that in the reverse, like, have you ever seen someone who had a growth that didn’t have fascial issues?

Lindsay Courcelle (18:55.802)
feel like that definitely indicates that there’s some restriction in the fascia when there’s some sort of solidity or growth. know, like a cyst or a tumor or a growth is a spot where things have become more solid. And it again just gets back to that, the phase of water of our bodies, this in between liquid and solid. We want it to be more towards liquid than towards solid, just for the sake of our breast health, cellular health.

So yeah, I mean, I’m very biased, obviously. I love fascia and I love my work and almost anything that you’d come at me with, I’d be like, let’s check out the fascia, you know? So like everyone that’s listening can take that with a grain of salt, but like, yes, I think it has to do with your fascia if you have any sort of cyst or growth in your breast.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:31.171)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:39.375)
Thank

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:48.473)
Yeah, and I think neither of us is saying it’s the end all be all, but it is a very heavy contributing factor that at the very least should be one of those major things on the list of if something’s up with my breast tissue, checking in with someone on fascia support or doing my own, know, getting a course or working with a practitioner should be one of those major things on the list.

Lindsay Courcelle (20:06.574)
Yes.

Lindsay Courcelle (20:12.333)
I think it’s just so easy and once you learn how to work with your breast tissue, you can do it for the rest of your life and you don’t have to go. I mean, you can see a practitioner once and learn it or you can take my class or, and I’ll even describe it on this call if you want me to, like the basics of it for people to just try. But I think that many people that have a benign cyst could learn to work with their breast tissue and change the way it feels under their skin. Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (20:39.435)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you said that you’ve had clients come in who had something show up on a memo and then do some fashion work, go back and it’s gone. That is so powerful. I mean, that speaks for itself. Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (20:50.455)
Yeah, and that’s like multiple clients. that’s definitely, that happens a lot.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (20:56.151)
Yeah, that’s not just a one-off.

Lindsay Courcelle (20:57.729)
Yeah, that’s not a one-off, for sure.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (21:00.801)
I think I want to take us back to this just for a second because we also, there’s maybe direct and indirect ways fascia is affecting everything, but specifically breast tissue. And is it right that, so we’re talking about when there’s constriction, it’s putting an immense amount of pressure on the cells, but it also then is affecting, for example, like you said, lymphatic flow, if that’s right. And is it also affecting blood flow? just there’s sort of like direct and indirect impacts when fascia is off.

Lindsay Courcelle (21:21.379)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Courcelle (21:24.952)
Yep.

Lindsay Courcelle (21:29.857)
Yeah, I mean, basically our whole body is fascia. It runs through and between every single cell of our body and our lymphatic system is housed within our fascia. And so, yes, it is affecting all of these things. And I would go so far as to say that it is going to affect the rest of your body as well. It’s not like it’s you will have something going on in your breasts and it’s not going to affect the rest of your body. So you can have the root cause be somewhere else other than your breasts kind of tugging on a place in your breast.

or vice versa and it’s very important in my official release to look at the body as a whole and to remember how intimately connected we are.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:08.333)
Yeah, completely, completely. And nothing is ever acute or isolated, really, in how it’s impacting, yeah. Okay, I think what I’ll wait till the end to maybe cover some of the general techniques, tips, things we could do for at-home care. But then of course, I think your workshop is gonna be like that deep, deep dive where also people can visualize it and get that very concentrated support on that.

Lindsay Courcelle (22:13.485)
Yeah, exactly.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:33.079)
I want to now ask a little bit about a couple pieces of this. So when you’re going through breast cancer, there’s often biopsies that are happening. There’s surgeries that are happening. There’s lumpectomies. Sometimes there’s breast removal. Lots of things, constriction, pressing, so many things happening with that tissue. And so I want to ask about things we can do. First of all, we may have already covered this, how some of that is impacting.

fascia, for example, like I had a, I had a biopsy and then I had a lumpectomy in my right breast for early stage breast cancer. And that it is very dense and a part of me, you know, now that we’re having this conversation before this, a part of me was like, I know they talk about scar tissue, but I’ve always been like, I don’t think it should be that dense and also painful. Still five years later, four years later. so already I’m like, I need to do some fascia work.

for sure with that. But how can scars or surgeries impact fashion? I know we touched on this briefly and then I think what I want to get into is maybe a couple things. Like as you’re going through an active cancer, what might be things we can do if we’re in kind of a precarious state physically? And then if you’re totally on the other side of a breast cancer diagnosis, you’re in remission, you’re NED, same thing. What we might be able to do to mitigate or kind of reverse some of the impact.

Lindsay Courcelle (23:31.16)
Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (23:48.139)
huh.

Lindsay Courcelle (23:59.65)
Yeah. it’s okay. So yeah, that’s great. Yeah. So, I like to think of the surgical scar or any sort of scar. It could be tiny. It could be, a little laparoscopic scar. It could be a little scar from, yeah, from a lumpectomy, whatever it is under that scar.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (24:01.167)
Sorry, I just gave you like five questions. Maybe let’s start with how scars and surgeries first just impact.

Lindsay Courcelle (24:27.617)
What has happened is your kind of sacred architecture of your body and your fascia has been, it has crumbled in some way. It will never be exactly the same as it was. And that’s not to make anyone feel defeated when they’ve had surgeries. But it is to speak to the fact that your tissue is then different. And there’s an amazing surgeon, he’s French, his name’s Jean-Claude Gimbartot, and my teacher, John Barnes, talks a lot about him.

He’s got an amazing video series you can find on YouTube called Strolling Under Your Skin or Under the Skin. But he’s taken this microscopic camera and he’s gone under the skin and shown in a living person what scar tissue looks like. And instead of it being this really fluid tissue like we want our fascia to be, it is much more dense. It’s very white and it’s very solid. And so I think sometimes of scars as almost like growing into you

like a spiderweb kind of like pulling on different parts of your body. And like you said, being dense and usually when there’s some pain there, that’s a sign that there’s some work to be done. our scars are amazing to work with and that could be one of those little scars or that could be, you know, if you’ve had implants or breast reduction where you have lots of women have scars that go all the way under the breast, under the whole breast or even sometimes around the nipple.

and just basically allowing your fingers to sink into that tissue. And I mean, there’s more particulars of this, but like the ideal situation is you just let your fingers sink in as if they’re sinking into clay and you just hold there. And what you can feel when you do that and the holding for a certain amount of time is important. So at least three to five minutes, but when you hold there, you’ll feel the tissue start to change under your fingers.

and you might feel that your fingers start to move a little bit and follow that release as it happens, and then you’re holding at another barrier, and then it might release and your fingers move a little bit more, and that’s kind of the idea with working with scars. Yeah, so that’s, I definitely think it impacts your breast health when you have any of these procedures done. It’s worth doing some work before and after, even a mammogram. I’ve had one mammogram and

Lindsay Courcelle (26:50.486)
I have larger breasts, it didn’t feel painful for me, but I hear from a lot of women that it’s quite painful. And maybe that’s for smaller breasts or just different, I guess, if your breasts are more restricted, it might be more painful. But I think even doing some work with your own breasts before and after a mammogram would be, in my mind, that is really important because first of all, when you do it before, you’re less likely to have something show up and be a flag for a problem that then leads you into this fear state.

that then when you’re in this fear state, just anyone who’s read any of Bruce Lipton or knows about epigenetics, it’s like when you’re in this fear state, your body cannot do its job to just maintain health. So we don’t want to be all flared up and in fear when we’re going through these processes, but then you have to go and get an ultrasound, biopsy, all the things. so…

doing it before a mammogram and then doing it after just to give your breasts a little bit of care because very often women are only touching their breasts looking for a lump. And I like to use this analogy of like, can you imagine if you’re a mother and you have children and you only touch your children when you’re worried that they have something wrong with them as opposed to like snuggling them and loving them and giving them your warm, loving attention?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:06.893)
Right.

Lindsay Courcelle (28:13.42)
That’s kind of like, to me that makes sense. Like of course our breasts want to be touched in a way that’s very nurturing and not only like palpating and feeling for a lump and always looking for that bad thing that might show up.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:13.679)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:26.465)
Yeah, completely. Okay, to that end, when someone is in the thick of a journey, right, maybe it’s they have biopsies or they have surgeries coming up. There’s a, what can we be doing? And this might be where we get into some more specific techniques. But I also want for those who might be really in kind of a precarious situation where it’s like, maybe they just had a surgery and the tissue is very, very tender or

Lindsay Courcelle (28:53.462)
yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:54.443)
something like that where they might not be able to do the full extent of fascial work on themselves, but are there still very subtle, gentle things they could do that could be impactful? Or is it more like we’ve got to wait until you get to a certain point of healing to then be able to do this work?

Lindsay Courcelle (29:07.648)
Yeah. So to do kind of deeper work, you do need to wait more like six weeks. But I know many MFR therapists who would work with someone immediately after a surgery just almost energetically working on those wounds. But if you are in the middle of breast cancer treatment and going through chemotherapy or radiation, doing these gentle MFR holds or going, mean, if you’re in a tough situation, that would

I think be the ideal time to seek out someone else to hold you. You know, it’s like, we can do so much ourselves, but there are times when we just need our body to be held by another person who has the capacity to hold us and who can, you know, when I’m working with people, what I feel is I feel the energy moving from their body into my body and going down into the earth. So I am sort of a conduit for any excess energy and emotions that they need to let out.

And sometimes it’s just hard to expel that energy on our own and we need someone else to hold us. So certainly just going and seeing a practitioner, I think before a surgery happens or after. And then, you know, the before is like helping to set your body up to better receive that surgery so that you can go into it with the mindset that you wanna have, feeling really good about it, feeling really powerful in that decision and kind of clearing away the fear

or other emotions that might be coming up before you take that step. And then afterwards to just care for the tissue and to help it to get back to that more fluid state as quickly as possible. And that’s really the thing is like if you start the work pretty soon after a procedure, it’s much quicker to just move back to its fluid state. Whereas it still can, I truly believe that it can be decades and decades and decades after a surgery and

I’ve felt this with so many of my clients that, you know, it’s a 70 year old woman who had breast surgery in her 20s and so it’s been 50 years or something like that. And I can feel the tissue change under my finger. So it’s not to say that it’s ever too late, but certainly if you address it sooner, it’s easier. And then with things like radiation, just doing this work can help your breasts to not feel so inflamed and to not, you know, that your breast tissue can feel much.

Lindsay Courcelle (31:34.36)
harder and more firm after radiation or anywhere in your body that you have radiated. I’ve also worked with, like I remember working with a man whose prostate was radiated and just working with him, was like his body felt alive again after we did that work. And it’s the same with women, you know, like it can feel like your breasts start to feel almost dead in a certain way after radiation. And this kind of brings the energy back into it and that fluidity and

and helps you feel again connected to that part of your body as well. And even with like a double mastectomy without augmentation, working with those scars is so powerful and so helpful just to, yeah, just to really like take the pressure out of the body, that crushing pressure that a fascial restriction can have.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (32:26.017)
Yeah, and to that end, we’re talking a lot about the physiology of fascia and how it contributes to physiological imbalances. But to your point, I want to hone in on this for just a quick second is, of course, it’s deeply emotional.

going through the experience of cancer, that’s what I’m working with clients every single day on is how can we metabolize this? How can we show up for our inner self and not emotionally bypass, but allow that expression and metabolize, metabolizing to happen in whatever way is palatable for your psyche at this time. And sometimes approaching that from body based work.

I, this is why I love clients who also do body based work because a lot of what we’re doing is, you know, we’re really working with the unconscious. So it’s very. Imaginal and metaphorical. There’s talking involved, but what a lot of body based work is, is I don’t need to tell you anything really. I don’t need to rehash a trauma or recount all these things or really vocalize this fear. It can just move through and be expressed in this body based way. And I think sometimes we need that. We need to not have to turn on.

the brain and just being in that felt sense.

Lindsay Courcelle (33:37.098)
Yeah. And yeah, I totally agree. And I think working with the unconscious and subconscious is so important too. So it’s both and different things at different times or different things for different people, right? Because I know for me, some of my most powerful experiences have been when I am receiving body-based work, because of course I love that. And then I have someone like the therapist

dialoguing with me or taking me through a little bit of a visualization and maybe even I’m voicing something that needs to be voiced and through all of that, that’s when the real full release and integration happens. So it’s not that it’s just one thing, but I definitely think that for people that have spent a long time trying to figure it out and they’re maybe like very analytical people and they go through their whole life like that, sometimes we just need to feel in the body.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:34.041)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Courcelle (34:34.591)
and not have to think about it and not try to figure it out and just totally surrender to the fact that we really aren’t in control in some ways and we just have to let go. We have to just let go physically to let it be released.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:49.815)
Yeah, completely. So to that end, I just, there’s such a benefit there in the midst of a diagnosis to be able to get that myofascial support for physiological reasons, but also for emotional tending, emotional metabolizing reasons too.

Lindsay Courcelle (35:05.141)
Yeah, because I think for a lot of people there are, whether or not they realize there’s an emotional component, there most likely is. And it might even be that they recognize a more recent emotional component, but they haven’t really ever grieved for their mother who died when they were 13, or whatever it is, or even a smaller wound around, you know, I think sometimes I think about our breasts being symbolic of nourishment.

and heart connection, and it could even be like the heartbreak that you had as a teenager or something, or like being abandoned by your first boyfriend or something like that that you’re holding onto in your tissue. And so sometimes those older things need to come up. And I’m sure you see this all the time, know, just people have so, we’re so multifaceted and have so many different layers to all these emotional holdings that we have.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (36:00.185)
completely, well yeah, mean, a part of my work is absolutely supporting them through the present day diagnosis. What does your psyche need to express and metabolize so that you can move through this from a place of calm and composure? You’re making decisions based on alignment, not fear. And the bulk of the work, the work that we’re always trying to get to is what is that past unmetabolized stuff?

the emotions, the beliefs, the experiences, the generational trauma, the birth trauma, because I’ve never worked with an individual experiencing cancer who didn’t have probably a number, I’d say at least like two or three past traumas that were really, really significant that needed to be metabolized further.

Lindsay Courcelle (36:41.577)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Courcelle (36:45.035)
That makes a lot of sense, yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (36:46.987)
Yeah, can we talk about as best you can and if it’s too hard to just describe verbally, if we really need the visual representation to talk about some techniques, I totally get it. But if there are, I don’t know, one or two tips that you could describe for people that they might be able to even try out later today after listening to this conversation. But then of course, we’ll direct people to go to your workshop because that’s really where they’re going to get that super comprehensive guide.

Lindsay Courcelle (36:59.596)
Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (37:05.813)
Yeah!

Lindsay Courcelle (37:15.583)
Yeah, absolutely, and I’m happy to just have women knowing how to do this work. it’s fine if they don’t want to come to this class. And I think I can explain it pretty well without showing. But the way that the most important thing for the breast care work, I would say that the one release that is easiest to describe is a breast pull. And so what you do is you gather up your breast tissue. You kind of take your hands like this and put them around your breasts.

and your hands are directly on your skin, so under a bra or under a shirt, that sort of thing, right on your skin, and you gather up your breast tissue and you slightly traction it away from your body until you feel that you’re meeting a barrier or like a stopping point. So it doesn’t have to be as hard as you can pull. You’re really going until you just feel like, there’s a stopping point, I’m gonna wait there. And then you hold it there. And so…

You hold it there and you wait for three to five minutes, even 10 minutes. And as you do that, the tissue starts to release. Now there’s a lot of nuance to that where like the way I teach it in the class is I actually have people pull their breasts and hold for a minute and then kind of draw a little circle with their, as if they’re drawing a little circle with their nipple and feel into how in each direction that their nipple is pointing.

there might be more or less of a pull or more or less of a restriction. And when they feel that there are those places with more restriction, they would hold in that direction. And there can be like twisting that you can do and there’s lots of techniques, there’s lots of different ways we can do the breast work. There’s ways we can work more on the inside of the breast or more on the outside of the breast and those sorts of things. That’s what I teach in my class.

But this basic breast pull is actually just really powerful. And if women only did that, they would notice a difference, I think. If they did that consistently, they would notice a difference. Now getting to like the nitty gritty of exactly how is what I teach in my class. But that’s the basics of it. It’s super simple. You’re never forcing. You’re very gentle. You’re finding a barrier. And then you’re waiting there for the tissue to release. And this is…

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:11.939)
What the?

Lindsay Courcelle (39:30.025)
Myofascial Release as it’s taught by my teacher, John Barnes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:33.549)
Yeah, maybe a bit of a selfish question here. For this, for my scar tissue that’s painful, is that still the kind of thing where you’re like applying gentle pressure waiting for a release or is there something you do differently?

Lindsay Courcelle (39:47.071)
Yeah, well, I think thinking more globally of your whole chest, neck, that whole region would be helpful. But specifically for that scar, I would just let my fingers sink in. I kind of describe it as fingers sinking into clay or as if you’re setting your fingers on a stick of butter and you’re trying to melt that whole stick of butter without pushing down, just through the heat and connection of your fingers. So you let your fingers sink into it very gently, like

Leigh Ann Lindsey (40:09.006)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Courcelle (40:16.342)
If you start to feel that the pain is more than maybe four out of 10, you back off a little bit. And you just let your fingers sink in there and you notice and you see if you can feel anything more under the tissue. And then you can play around with, like I was describing, kind of going in a circle. You can let your fingers move in a little, as they’ve sunk into that scar, you let them move in a little circle and feel like, actually when I move in this direction away from the center of my body,

it feels like that’s the direction I should hold. And so you hold there. And all of it is just always being very gentle, never forcing. And so I think that’s the biggest difference with the work I do, the myofascial release and kind of the breast massage people is like, there’s nothing wrong with breast massage. I’m sure it’s beneficial. I love massage personally and I think it’s great, but I think myofascial release can be…

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:01.647)
Thanks.

Lindsay Courcelle (41:12.944)
super, super powerful and there is this research now out of UC Berkeley that just through compression or manual pressure, breast cancer cells are reverting back to normal healthy cells and this is done in a lab so it’s not to say that this work is doing this, but I can extrapolate that in my mind and say like, okay, if that’s a possibility, then certainly this is worth a try.

Like it’s absolutely not gonna hurt and it might help a ton. And so it just helps those cells to reorganize and be healthier. I think we can, I believe that it’s possible for us to stop breast cancer from developing or to revert it back to healthy cells. And I know that’s a big statement to make and obviously I’m not a doctor and so you can just, everyone can know that that’s not medical.

information meant to diagnose or cure someone, but that is my true belief. And I do have a client who, you we’ve worked with her breasts and she’s, she has not wanted to go the kind of conventional route of having a biopsy on her breasts. And so we’re in this like wait and see zone and things have changed a little bit, but like that’s the only person I’m working with where, and I haven’t worked with her in a long time, but

Leigh Ann Lindsey (42:13.262)
Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (42:37.142)
I have this curiosity and this feeling of like, I wonder if more work would help her. And I just don’t know, and I’ll never know. we can, you know, this is the problem is there isn’t research on these kinds of hands-on techniques to show whether or not it works.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (42:52.821)
Yeah, and hopefully one day there will be and that we get, think realistically that’ll be something that private investors are funding to get that kind of information. So yeah, I hope for a world where we have more information, but what I kind of go back to sometimes is when it’s something that has no negative side effects and the positive benefit can be massive.

Lindsay Courcelle (43:02.197)
Yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:19.369)
it’s worth, everything’s worth a try when those are the realities of it. So I love that. Okay. Maybe last two questions I do because I am so like visual and visceral. I like to really understand what to expect. And so this is what with myofascial work is still a little bit fuzzy for me. If I were to come into a practitioner, like let’s say I were to come to you for an individual session, what does that?

Lindsay Courcelle (43:21.674)
Absolutely.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:44.687)
process look like? Because I do think people might still be bringing in like massage therapy, kind of like, okay, so I lay down, you go over my whole body. So what might that look like for someone?

Lindsay Courcelle (43:51.253)
Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (43:57.643)
Yeah, so kind of the way it’s taught by my teacher and the way that I do that work is I will first do a standing postural assessment with a woman in her bra and underwear or shorts and a tank top. So I can see her body and kind of notice where I’m drawn to intuitively that might be a root cause for some of the dysfunction or pain in her body. And then when I’m working with breasts, I often just work under their tank top.

client does lay down on a table, massage table, and I don’t use any oil or anything like that. I just use my hands and their dry skin and I will put my hands on their body and I’ll often work under a tank top or under a bra or if they want to take off whatever they have on top or like if they come in with a really tight bra I will have them remove that and I’ll drape them with either a sheet or a pillowcase and

Yeah, I ask for permission, I put my hands on their breasts and I would do those breast pulls, I would do the work of letting my fingers sink into the scar tissue, and I wouldn’t only work on their breasts, I would work on other parts of their body as well because it’s very important to balance the pelvis, it’s important to just really address the whole body, not to say that in one session every single part of the body would be touched, but depending on medical history and history of traumas, I would

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:04.751)
Okay, yeah, that’s what I wanted to understand.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:18.308)
right.

Lindsay Courcelle (45:23.05)
potentially work in a few different places and not only in the breast and that’s a really important aspect of this work because for example, I worked with someone this morning and totally different situation. She’s having pain in her hip and it was very tight and we worked up in her neck and her jaw and I went down and palpated the hip again and it felt totally different and it felt different for her too. So it’s just keeping this idea in mind that our body as a whole and not thinking of it as parts is

is very important in this work.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:54.191)
100%, but to that end, I think it’s definitely a lot more refined than just, yeah, we’re doing facial work over the whole body, because it sounds like that might not even be necessary. It’s we really want to look at those key points, but that’s a part of the assessment.

Lindsay Courcelle (46:11.028)
Yeah, absolutely. And also, you know, not every myofascial release practitioner works with breasts and that depends on their training, that depends on their comfort level and state laws, which I don’t know anything about all the different state laws, but it’s nothing that I have to worry about in Vermont and I know how important this work is. So I definitely, I feel like the breasts definitely need attention from therapists.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (46:17.708)
Okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (46:37.595)
yeah, completely. And I think for people to just kind of have as an expectation is, is it all about the holds? Everything’s being held for those longer prolonged periods of time.

Lindsay Courcelle (46:49.502)
Yeah.

Yeah, so there’s all different types of holds. There’s compression, there’s pulls, there’s letting my fingers sink in, there’s kind of sandwiching my hands around their body and different things like that. But it is really specifically related to the time. And three minutes at a very bare minimum is what gets into the collagenous or the collagen part of the fascia. And that is really what will create a change in our shape and structure. you’ve…

If you’re doing this work on your own, you might feel a release start around a minute and a half. That’s kind of the elastic part of the fascia. And then as you hold longer, there are these amazing things that happen. There’s a moment where our body releases its own anti-inflammatory and that’s called interleukin-8. And that’s kind of all I know about it. But like, just knowing that fact, my mind is blown at like how much is happening when we can just slow down and hold. And for most people,

part of maybe why they ended up with this diagnosis is they needed to slow down in their life. So they need a therapy that is slow and just holds. And like how uncomfortable can that feel to some people to just have to slow down entirely?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:03.021)
Totally. Well, in depth psychology, we’re all about the metaphors. And I just find whatever the diagnosis is, whether it’s cancer or MS or fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis, there’s mast cell activation. There’s almost always a metaphor in the disease that contributes to the emotional state.

Lindsay Courcelle (48:23.613)
Yeah, that makes so much sense.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:25.421)
So it’s just fascinating. But I think that’s helpful even for me to know, because part of what makes me feel safe emotionally trying something new is, okay, I’ve got a bit of an image in my mind of what that’s going to be like. And I do think for some people who may not really understand myofascial, they go in and that idea of just holding one thing for three to five minutes might actually sort of shock or confuse them for a bit because they’re kind of expecting this.

deep digging and all this movement all over the place. So it’s nice to sort of set that expectation.

Lindsay Courcelle (48:56.341)
Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because even though it might seem like, you’re just holding one place for five minutes, the amount of change that’s happening in your own body and that many people feel themselves, how it connects to other parts of their body, they’ll feel emotion come up, they’ll see memories, they’ll feel memories, know, like there’s so much going on and it’s just that the practitioner is not moving their hands, but there’s a lot happening.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:22.477)
Yeah. Yes, completely. Okay, last question I think I wanted to bring up is what does this look like to have a breast care practice for each of us as individuals?

In some ways, it’s sort of an obvious of like, of course we need to maintain anything we want to be optimal and healthy, we need to maintain to some degree. But I want to have as best as you can, a general understanding of is this the type of thing that we really should be doing every single day? Is this something that it’s like for the most person, if there’s not any accidents that have come up or injuries or surgeries, it might just be a check-in you do with yourself once a week or once a month.

Lindsay Courcelle (50:04.724)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:05.005)
What might that look like? And I know that’s hard and nuanced.

Lindsay Courcelle (50:08.104)
Yeah, I think it is nuanced. think there’s no one answer. And for me, I’m breastfeeding a one-year-old. there are times that I’m just laying and breastfeeding and do with one hand, I’ll do work on the other breasts, for example. And I don’t have any really specific self-care routine. But I think for most women, it could be once a week, even once a month, like just kind of occasionally checking in with their body.

when they start to notice that their shoulders or neck are feeling tight, working with the breasts can actually release so much in the upper body. if they feel like they need an emotional release, sometimes working with the breasts can be great. So I like to really try to meet my clients where they’re at. And if that looks like they have time to take this on as once a day, like 10 minutes a day, then that’s great. But if it’s like they’re a busy…

mom or whatever, just have a busy life. I like to just have them kind of figure out a way they can create a ritual out of this and so maybe it’s every night when they go to bed they just do one hold on each breast or maybe it’s once a week they do that or whatever it is and I think any of that is going to be beneficial.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:25.955)
Yeah. Okay. That gave me another specific question. Sorry. For someone who let’s say is like preparing for surgery, they know they have some kind of breast surgery or maybe even just like a biopsy coming up. But maybe for also something more specific, like a surgery, supporting the fascia in advance of that, what might that look like? Is that something where it’s like, yeah, once a week with a practitioner is enough leading up to that? Or is it kind of like a leading up to that you really want to be doing it more often?

And then same question for after a surgery, what might be sort of like that minimum we would want to do either with ourself or with a practitioner to make sure it’s actually creating change.

Lindsay Courcelle (51:55.733)
Yeah.

Lindsay Courcelle (52:08.041)
I think if someone, I think anytime these medical diagnoses and challenges are coming up, it is a moment for us to reflect on how devoted we want to be to our body. And there’s never going to be too much. So as much as possible, would say leading up to a surgery, but I would say even beyond that, as much as possible and then having a diagnostic test again before having surgery. I think it’s worth, if it were me,

That is absolutely what I would do. I would take time to work on the tissue. I would maybe receive work from another practitioner or even do an intensive where the myofascial intensives are 15 hours a week, 15 hours in one week of therapy, so it’s a lot. But I would just do as much as possible and then I would go and get checked again, get a biopsy again, get a mammogram again, whatever it is. And certainly leading up to surgery, the same, as much as you possibly can. And then afterwards,

being really gentle with yourself and knowing that the, think after any surgery, what I always try to tell people is like, think long game, you know? Like this isn’t about getting back to how you felt as quickly as possible. This is about like every single moment, checking in with your body and asking it what it needs. And if it’s telling you that it needs rest, don’t put so much pressure on yourself to do this work.

But if it’s telling you that it needs attention, that’s the time to lean into that.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (53:37.389)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I we talked about your intensive last time we were on the call and I actually want to do that so bad. I think that’s gonna be something I do at some point with the PhD. I have to take three weeks off of school. So I’m not I’m not able to take a lot of vacation right now. That is so so I I feel like I physically feel that in my body of

Lindsay Courcelle (53:46.996)
would be amazing.

Lindsay Courcelle (53:52.079)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:02.719)
even just like a once a week myofascial, I think that could be nice, but there’s just an intuition in my spirit of giving it that attention day after day after day after day in that really concentrated way is something I feel very resonant for me.

Lindsay Courcelle (54:17.735)
Yeah, I mean it can be so good and I think just remembering that there can never be too much, but also just always listening to your body and listening to your body’s wisdom is always my go-to.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:31.085)
Yeah, completely. Well, I think that’s a beautiful place to close unless there’s something really, really important that we didn’t cover.

Lindsay Courcelle (54:37.968)
No, I think that’s it. just, I always just want to help people understand that it really can be simple and you know, like with my class, for example, and if there was some other way, like I, the only way can really teach this is if people come to my class or come and see me, but like you can learn the techniques and you don’t, it’s not complicated. Once you learn it, you have it for the rest of your life. And that’s really empowering.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:02.445)
Yeah, completely. I love that. Lindsay, thank you so much.

Lindsay Courcelle (55:06.185)
Thank you.