THE ACCRESCENT™ PODCAST EPISODE 187

Ep. 187 FINAL

[00:00:00] Hello, welcome back to the Accrescent Podcast. I’m your host, Leigh Ann Lindsey. Before getting into today’s episode with Lindsay, which I think you guys are going to absolutely love, I wanted to share a really quick update regarding Cereset. Cereset Encinitas reached out to me to offer an exclusive discount just to my audience and clients for 50% off a package of five Cereset sessions.

For those of you who have been longtime listeners, I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about them. We also had Andrew from Cereset Encinitas on the podcast. I believe that was episode 157. I’ll make sure it’s linked in the show notes below. And it has been such a wonderful kind of friendship and relationship that has since developed with them after this, and I’ve had now a number of clients go to them in Encinitas for a round of CSET sessions, [00:01:00] and this is such a generous, generous offer offer, 50% off is a huge discount. Typically, five CSET sessions is about 1800, and so they’re offering a package of five for just $900. They’ve asked that this is just an offer extended in the month of April. Meaning not that you have to book all of your sessions in April, but that you will need to have purchased a package and booked out those five sessions, even if they’re in a different month before the end of April.

It has been an absolutely game changing resource for me. In the intro to my episode with Andrew, I shared a bit of my experience because I did five sessions on a weekly basis, almost about a year ago now, I. And it was absolutely game changing for me at an incredibly overwhelming turbulent time in my life.

And now I actually do [00:02:00] CSET sessions with them in Encinitas once a month just to maintain brain health, to support my nervous system. It is one of my most favorite things I do and one of my most favorite resources I now have in my toolkit. Just to clarify though, it is only the Encinitas location that is offering this discount.

It is not any cset location. I have a really special relationship with them. And so they’ve been kind enough to offer this discount just to my audience at their Encinitas location in San Diego. So if you’re unfamiliar with Sarah Set, I really encourage you to check out the podcast episode with them, where we go deep into the technology, the benefits, a bit of Andrew’s experience, how he really feels like it pulled him back from a near death experience that really, really impacted him, mind, body, and spirit.

It’s just a phenomenal resource and a phenomenal episode. [00:03:00] So with that, pivoting to today’s guest, Lindsay Courcelle. Lindsay is a seasoned myofascial release therapist with over a decade of experience helping clients heal from chronic pain and emotional blockages. Specializing in pelvic and breast care.

She uses MFR techniques to address the body’s deeper layers of tension, promoting lasting relief, and emotional wellbeing. Lindsay is passionate about empowering women to reconnect with their bodies through hands-on therapy that nurtures both physical and emotional healing. Based in Shrewsbury, Vermont, she offers both in-person and virtual sessions providing a holistic approach to wellness.

We have previously had on a guest Sue Hitzmann to talk about fascia myofascial release, and I’ll make sure that episode is linked below in the show notes. This was so beautiful though because this conversation really was much more geared towards myofascial release for emotional [00:04:00] healing and talking a lot about the unconscious and how we store unmetabolized emotions in the fascia of our tissue and how when that fascia is.

Blocked, it becomes kind of hardened and then prevents energy flow and blood flow and how that can then kind of ripple out into poor physical health. Lindsay felt like such an aligned synergistic guest and I am so excited to try myofascial release myself. I’m actually really interested. She has an intensive where you fly out to Vermont and over the course of a week you do 10 hours of myofascial release in one week, and I’m so interested in doing that with her sometime.

I think that could just lead to insane quantum shifts in healing, at least for me. But this was such a beautiful, beautiful conversation and I hope you all enjoy. So without further ado, Lindsay Courcelle [00:05:00] Well, Lindsay, welcome to the Accrescent Podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk with you.

I’m really excited about this because maybe a year, maybe even a year and a half ago, we had Sue hitman on to talk about fascia and fascial work, but more from a perspective of chronic pain, more from a physiology perspective of how your fascia might be contributing to chronic physical ailments, and it’s all interconnected, which I’m sure we’re gonna cover, but.

As I was listening to some other previous guest interviews you had done, I was getting so excited to talk to you about Fascia as a big support for emotional healing. Yeah. And I normally don’t, I sometimes I love to dive into someone’s origin story. Sometimes I’m like, we gotta get straight to the material ’cause there’s so much to cover.

But in one of your past conversations I was listening to, you shared about how you had observed some emotional patterns in yourself that you [00:06:00] just couldn’t seem to break. And fascia work was kind of the first thing that allowed some of those to clear. And I was wondering if you’d be comfortable maybe even sharing a bit of your introduction to this field, this modality and, and a little bit of those patterns you experience and how it helped you with emotional healing as well.

So I will just start by sharing a little bit about my childhood, which is that my parents split up when I was four years old, so it’s a pretty early age. And then my mom remarried when I was five and we had this kind of span of time from the time I was five until I was maybe 10 or 11, where my mom and my stepdad had a really rocky relationship.

And so we would move in with him mm-hmm. And then we’d move away from him. And we did that every year for five or six years. So, um, within the course of one year, I was moving like away and back. And so stability was not [00:07:00] there for my actual, like, physical body. I. I’m blessed that my parents, my mom and dad always did show me a lot of love.

So it wasn’t that I had no, it wasn’t that I was lacking love in my childhood, but there just wasn’t stability. And so then fast forward to my early adulthood and I had been with my husband for I think about seven years when we got married and we were newlyweds and building a life together in Vermont where he’s from.

And consciously I was very happy with everything going on in my life. I loved the work that I was finding through body work. That was, at the time I was just a massage therapist, but I knew I was on the path towards something that I really loved. And I loved my husband and I loved where we lived in our community, but I still was having this feeling of wanting to flee and.

I describe it as wanting to flee because it was very much this deep sense of [00:08:00] just un uncomfortable, I guess, with the stability of my life. You know, I just like, it wasn’t that I wanted to be with another person or necessarily go to any particular place. It was just like this, like wanting to leave everything behind.

And it was concerning for me because I had just gotten married and I felt like I should have this like honeymoon phase and be really happy and I could just feel that it was deep inside of me. So, um, I walked down to my mailbox and I happened upon this brochure for myofascial release trainings with John Barnes and.

Kind of, as soon as I saw the brochure, my intuition was like, oh yes, this is what I am meant to do. And there weren’t any therapists really nearby. So I booked a trip to visit my brother in Austin, Texas, and there were a lot of therapists there. And I chose one and went to see her. And within just a few minutes of her having my, her hands on my body, which was around the top of my pelvis, I just let out [00:09:00] these sobs and emotion that I felt like I’d been holding in my whole life.

And I’ve always been someone that’s cried and emoted, but there was something different about this release, like it was coming from a different place in my body. It just felt so, so, um, magical to me and really, really important. And from that point forward, I just knew that this was the type of work I wanted to do.

And what I came to understand in the course of my first year or year and a half doing this work, I went to a lot of seminars to learn the work. And I also received an intensive treatment in Sedona, where I went for 15 hours of treatment in one week. And it was over the course of this time that I realized that this pattern was really deeply embedded in my fascia from my childhood.

And as it started to unravel, my life became pretty chaotic, and my husband and my relationship [00:10:00] was really kind of like on the rocks for a long stretch. And then there just came this point where finally. There was resonance, which is what happens when we do this kind of body work, is that the phases change.

It goes from more solid to this liquid. And then, and then with that, there’s this resonance and there was just somehow this resonance for my husband and I and for myself internally. And that feeling of wanting to flee was no longer there. So it, it’s come up again just a tiny bit. Um, a few years ago when we purchased the land that we live on, which is 92 acres and two houses, and you know, we’ve now, we now have three kids.

So it was like, again, just this. It was so much stability in my life and having to kind of like, I think deep down it was this feeling of like, am I worthy of this much happiness and this much abundance? Mm-hmm. And so getting to that in a different sort of way, it didn’t really manifest in the same way.

And I could really see it from the [00:11:00] outside and kind of notice the way I was responding to the stability. Um, so that was the only time. It’s kind of like flared up, I guess I would say. But otherwise, that feeling of wanting to flee has just been totally gone. And like I said, when it came up again, it was very different.

There was nothing in me that was even questioning or considering leaving my life. It was just like, okay, how do I work with this and how do I release the emotion that needs to be released and just kind of process all of this. And then that also just again, like, just kind of flowed out of me and, and settled and hasn’t been back at all.

So yeah, it’s been really a really beautiful journey for me. I think a couple things I’ll just sit with for a second are one, I, I work in patterns. That’s how I see the world. That’s how I understand my own life. But also with clients. What are the patterns? What are the emotional patterns? What are the behavioral patterns?

And to your point, this, this pattern was kind of always ever present. It wasn’t [00:12:00] derailing your life, but it was always there. And how much of my capacity on any given day is going towards interacting with maintaining course correcting from this pattern. But I also think it’s worth pointing out that many of us, myself included for many years.

We’re stuck in patterns that really were sabotaging things and in some ways derailing Yeah. Our lives. And I think it’s, you know, so that it’s always a spectrum. And for, for those listening, it’s kind of like, what are those patterns you feel stuck in? Some of them might be really severely impacting your life.

Some of them might not be, but it’s just always this ever present feeling or narrative or impulse. And what I love about your work and the work I do, I, I’m so excited to talk about why I think what you do is so complimentary to what I do and why it’s so necessary because. We don’t need to be trapped with these forever.

And I think sometimes when we’ve lived [00:13:00] in them for so long, it starts to feel like this. Well, this is just how, this is who I am, this, I just have this flee thing and I’m gonna have it forever. And even if you get used to it and it’s not so severe, it’s exhausting. And to think like, oh no, we can be free from this, from a lot of this in a huge, huge way.

Not that it never comes up. ’cause I agree. I see what you see where we, I don’t know that we ever a thousand percent clear something where it never comes back. But it’s so different. And if it does, it’s maybe like a tiny little poke of the head out. And we have so many more tools and autonomy to be able to navigate it.

Yes, that’s a beautiful thing is to kind of walk that spiral and have something come back up and then it’s suddenly like, oh, but this is really different and I’m a different person now. And I will just say that there were times where I do feel like that pattern was derailing my life. You know, like I had a really hard time, I would say I didn’t have a hard time, um, connecting and forming relationships, but I think that my behaviors in [00:14:00] my early twenties relationships were very much like creating instability by just kind of like blowing up my relationships before they could settle into stability.

And for whatever reason, with my husband, he’s just an amazing person and has had the ability to just kind of be with me through that and trust that. Mm-hmm. I mean, he could see like the possibility that was on the other side, I feel like. So I owe a lot to him because I think without him, I. Being the grounding force that he is, which he is like just, he’s a very earthy, grounded, um, earth centered person.

He’s a farmer, he’s an herbalist. And so he’s, he’s grounded in that way and he’s also, his family goes back like seven generations where we live. So he has an actual, like physical rootedness in his body that mm-hmm. I’ve never known, because I’ve never lived in a place that my family goes back that many generations.

Wow. You know, so, and that’s on both sides of his family too. So it’s like [00:15:00] this really different sort of feeling, which. I feel like I can almost kind of see in our children and in myself, I can feel its absence. Like I feel called more to, um, England, where like my ancestry goes way back than I do anywhere physically.

Other than that, and I’ve never, I’ve lived in England only for a year when I studied abroad in college. But like he has a place in on the earth that his body actually feels that safety and that resonance and that stability in a such a different way than I’ve ever experienced. So that’s a piece of it too.

But I absolutely agree with you that like no one has to live with these sorts of patterns and often they can be so, um, like negatively spiraling because it’s like we have this pattern and then we’re like, oh, why do I do that? And you can’t figure out the reason, you can’t reason your way through it necessarily consciously.

It’s something that has to come out of your tissue. Mm-hmm. [00:16:00] Completely. Yes. Well, I think where it pairs so well is, maybe this is a good point to kind of segue of. I, I’m, I’m studying depth psychology, getting my PhD, which is all about the unconscious mind. And so a, most of what I’m doing is working with cancer and chronic illness patients to help identify what’s going on in the unconscious that can allow me to have more peace, calm, and clarity.

Of course, processing the present day experience. But then the bulk of what I do and what I get so excited about is what, what might be the past turbulence that could be contributing to this diagnoses? How is this diagnoses my unconscious, my mind, body, spirit communicating to me? But with that said, I primarily work with.

The unconscious self, spirit, soul, psyche. And yet what I see is if I had to kind of boil it down to its most minute, it’s, we pick up narratives. And sometimes narratives are ingrained in our [00:17:00] psyche and sometimes narratives are ingrained in our body. And what I have come to see over the years is that sometimes, sometimes a narrative, like we need both, we need body work and we need cognitive work.

And I think more specifically, unconscious work of what’s going on, that’s not in my awareness. But sometimes what I see is if there is too much of a, I’m like making fists with my hands ’cause it’s this kind of like rigidity, stuckness, hijacking. I can see it on either side that doesn’t allow the narrative to shift or move through.

And sometimes I’ll have people come in saying, I’ve been doing every kind of possible body work I can think of. Nothing is clearing these patterns in my shoulder posture or these patterns in my gait or these patterns in my pelvic or these patterns in my, you know, gut symptoms. And that’s where I’ll say, okay, maybe the stuckness is coming from the unconscious piece, which is what I [00:18:00] support.

But I also see it flipped where someone might come into me and maybe there’s not a ton of, or maybe there are some physiological patterns, but co unconsciously we’re clearing a lot. And yet I. It’s not fully moving through, and that’s where I’m like, oh, the stuckness is in the tissue, so we need to go address the tissue first.

And so sometimes when I’m working with someone and I can see these, these unconscious beliefs are just so, so, so rigid. And even with the work I do with. Unconscious and evox therapy, it’s not clearing. That’s for me is like such a clear sign, oh, we’ve gotta go dialogue with the physical body and this is where I think fascia work comes in.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think absolutely. I, I 100% agree that. I see in my work all the time, um, that sometimes it’s more one or the other, just as you’re describing. Sometimes it’s, and sometimes it’s an easy release for someone and sometimes it takes a lot longer for them to even have the awareness [00:19:00] around the pattern.

You know, sometimes people come in and they know of the pattern and other times just through the course of working with me a handful of times, I can listen to what they’re saying and feel whatever is coming up in their body and kind of help them to bring awareness to the patterns. And I’m not sure how much of that you do, but um, you know, very often just what people say in passing that they think is not related to a pattern can give you those clues.

And I absolutely love being a kind of. Pattern, detective myself, I think we are kindred spirits. ’cause I, I, I love just like looking for those patterns, both of their physical body and of their movement. And also what I hear them saying from like, deep within, it’s kind of like what, what they speak that they might not think is so meaningful that after I hear it a few times, I’m like, okay, there’s something there.

Mm-hmm. And that’s completely the unconscious coming through I think. Yeah. You know, in my field that’s what I would say is that’s the [00:20:00] unconscious coming through and communicating. And I often, I think of myself less of a, you know, an expert in something and, you know, imparting all this wisdom into you and more of a translator of your psyche, your mind, body and spirit is always communicating.

I’m here to just listen and translate and give that back to you and then empower you to be able to see it, hear it, and make some of those shifts. Yeah, that makes so much sense. And just kind of just by being that mirror, or like you said, being a translator, just allowing someone to, um, to ex allowing, allowing them to just kind of see from a different perspective.

Sometimes by putting it in different words or speaking it in a different way, that’s all that’s needed. And my main teacher from myofascial release, John Barnes always says that with awareness, there’s choice. So once we have that awareness, there’s a little bit more of choice or options for how to move forward.

Whereas when it’s not even in our awareness, there’s nothing that can be done. [00:21:00] Yeah. And I think a lot of the people who come to me, this is where I think it goes, that layer deeper of most people who come to me, they do have an awareness of their patterns, and yet they’re like, so why am I still stuck? And that’s where I go, because it’s not your conscious mind.

We need to dialogue with, it’s your unconscious. And it’s not as black and white as just, well, here’s the pattern, here’s the narrative. So think something different. For me, it’s much more of a tending process of what, what part of me created this belief or this narrative? Mm-hmm. What does that part still need to say?

What did she never get to express? What does she need to feel safe in welcoming in new narratives? So it’s, it’s much, much more, and I, I think that’s important to say. ’cause I see a lot of rhetoric, especially in like manifestation culture and, and sub, you know, even like limiting belief culture where it’s like, I.

Identify the belief, change it, and then just tell yourself that new belief over and over. And I, I think that can work with [00:22:00] some, but the ones that are really deeply ingrained and are coming from. Traumatic experiences, generational trauma, birth trauma, those are the ones that need much, much more tending to them.

Yeah, and I agree. I, um, so some of the more subconscious unconscious work that I’m doing is through kind of an inner child healing and dialoguing, um, when people are on the table and then sometimes through heart healing this other modality that I use. But very often I agree that when people are able to actually voice what needed to be said at the time of trauma or in their childhood, that’s when I see a pretty profound shift is like just allowing their voice to kind of come out and be clear and unfiltered.

You know, maybe they’ve consciously sort of forgiven their, whatever parent or whoever might have caused them harm, but, and they don’t wanna dwell on it. So [00:23:00] that’s an interesting thing with. This day and age is, I feel like there’s so much about like radical self-responsibility and not being a victim, and I think sometimes people actually need to feel into their victimhood and it’s okay for them to express their anger or rage or sadness at being a victim because a lot of times that just gets suppressed and then we’re carrying it around and saying like, oh, I shouldn’t feel that way.

I’ve already processed that or I’ve already talked to my therapist about that. But it’s like, no, you actually need to express that in order for it to fully move through. I wanted to take a second to share about a new product I recently discovered, and you guys know I just love trying new things, but when I get introduced to something I love, I really, really love it and it becomes, usually it becomes some kind of staple in my routine, and that is exactly what this product has become.

It is the new Jacob protein bar. [00:24:00] And I am gonna share a couple of things I love about it most. But what I have to start out by saying is I don’t like protein bars. I think they’re disgusting. Most of them taste gross or are just filled with so many unnecessary or toxic ingredients that it’s not even worth eating.

So I haven’t bought protein bars in years. There’s something I just kind of gave up on, but recently one of the amazing staff at Ascent where my new LO office location is introduced me to the Jacob Bars and their title is The World’s Cleanest Protein Bar. They have 20 grams of grass fed protein, no seed oils, nothing artificial.

Let me just read you the ingredient list for their chocolate version. It’s a grass fed protein blend, organic tapioca fiber, organic honey, grass fed beef, tallow, organic dates, organic almond butter, organic [00:25:00] unsweetened chocolate, organic cacao powder, organic chocolate extract, sea salt. That’s it. And I absolutely love the taste.

They have three different flavors, chocolate, vanilla, that has some chocolate chips in it, and then a berry bar, and I actually love all three of them. And these have quickly become a staple at some point in my day, because usually one of my meals in the day is a meal that I need to just have a quick protein bar, maybe have a protein shake.

So these, I now have a box of these in my office at all times for those days when I need, I didn’t get to have breakfast so I can just have a really, really clean, nutritious protein bar. Or same thing, I didn’t get to pack lunch, so I’m gonna have this protein bar. Uh, it has absolutely blown me away with how clean it is, but also how good they taste.

So check the link in the show notes to learn more about Jacob and try their bars. Oh my gosh. Yes. Well, and this is [00:26:00] like all the things I say all the time, I love it because it’s just because you know what happened Doesn’t mean you felt what happened. Yes. And I do think there’s something very profound, and something I say all the time is the mind, body and spirit will be willing to hear what we have to say.

Once it has first felt heard that, and that is that messy piece. I love that. That is that raw piece that is just like, just what needs to be expressed. And maybe it’s words. Yeah. Maybe it’s somatic movement, maybe it’s just screaming. Yeah. Um, so I think that’s really, really profound. I think I took us, I jumped ahead a little bit.

I think it is important for us to rewind and go just for any who are new to this topic. What is fascia? We went so far into this already, but what is fascia? And I am really curious to hear from your perspective and all that you’ve learned and study, but also just what you see in your [00:27:00] practice. What, what do we understand so far of kind of the physiology of how emotions can be impacting fascia and, and how those things work?

Yeah. Well, so fascia is, um, it’s a continuous head to toe web of tissue in our bodies. It’s our connective tissue, but it’s essentially our whole body and it’s this beautiful liquid crystal matrix that can conduct electrical currents and essentially. Provide information to any part of our body at really quick speeds.

Um, so I like to think of it as kind of this information superhighway, especially when it comes to emotions. Um, let’s see, what else. So it, it surrounds and supports all of your organs. It surrounds all of your muscles. It creates the shape and structure of our body. And it, for a long time was ignored because in cadaver labs it would just be [00:28:00] scraped away to see the underlying structures within.

But now there’s this awareness that fascia in a dead being is very different than it is in a living being. So in a living, being, you know, we are energetic beings and, um, the ground substance of our fascia, this liquid crystal sort of goo, that makes up a lot of our fascia along with collagen and elastin.

Um, these components of our fascia make us really strong. They make us so that we can. Uh, withstand stretches and tensile forces. It makes it so that we can absorb shocks of like an impact or something like that, or a fall. And, and it provides this connectivity within our body so that it’s not like our brain sending a signal to a cell.

It’s like our whole body is in communication with each other all the time. It’s not just this like one place to another place. Um, so in terms of the physiology of [00:29:00] emotions, I wish that I could speak to it more intelligently. I know I still haven’t read molecules of emotion by Candace Pert, but she’s someone that I know was an expert in this field, and I just think of it as.

That basically, if we’ve had an experience that we can’t fully process at the time, so you could consider that a trauma or whatever you wanna call that. If we have emotion that didn’t get expressed, we just kind of store it in our tissue. It’s just, it’s there. It’s there in the waters of our body. Kind of our body is like filling up.

Mm-hmm. Filling up, filling up with as much emotion as we keep in. And when we cry, we let that out. Right. Or when we emote in some other way. But when we don’t, that emotion, which should really be energy in motion, is just kind of creating this dam of mm-hmm. Energy in our body. So it’s like prevents the flow of, of energy, but also nutrition and waste.

And [00:30:00] in the actual body, like thinking of a surgical scar, there’s now. A French surgeon, gen Jean Claude Gito, who has shown that you can go under the skin and, and see what fascia looks like in a living being. And it’s very dynamic and it’s almost like this spiderweb mm-hmm. Where there’s goo between the spiderweb.

But these little tendrils of fascia will slide and glide along each other and they’ll disconnect and reconnect elsewhere. And where was I going with this about emotions? Um, well, basically just that throughout our entire body, this is happening. And so when we have emotions that we are not allowing to express, we are creating this spot where the tissue becomes more solid, it becomes more restricted, and it’s like a dam of energy.

And so in like a surgical scar that looks much different. It’s much more white tissue, it’s much, it’s much more dense mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Than the fluidity of the rest of our system. [00:31:00] And so I really believe that by allowing those emotions to express, it allows our body to move back into that more fluid, liquid crystal state.

And without allowing those to express, it’s just, we’re just filling up our tissue and it’s starting to solidify in there the longer it’s in there. Yeah. I, I love that. I think it’s making me think of, so my practice is, is inside of a holistic. Kind of health center. And one of the practitioners, a dear friend of mine, Danielle Palmer, does skinnar therapy and bio modulator and all these energy therapies and they can, they always measure the different meridian systems to see where there are gaps or blocks in the flow of energy.

And we at the center, we work with a lot of cancer and chronic illness in general. And it’s a huge thing we talk about with our cancer patients of, you know, we can map out this Meridian has different gaps where the energy isn’t flowing appropriately and it [00:32:00] will almost always match up to all the organs connected to that meridian system.

Oh, they have had different ailments over the lifetime and usually the spot where the cancer is, is a part of that meridian system. Interesting. But it’s making me, me kind of pull all these pieces together with what you’re seeing. Maybe a part. Right. Um, Danielle talks a lot about surgeries and scars and how scar tissue is not electrically conductive anymore.

Yeah, yeah. And that can be a part of why that electrical circuit gets broken. But you’re making me think that this fascia component is such a huge factor here where when something gets repressed, I like to use the word metabolized or unmetabolized. Yes. So when an experience, an emotion, a narrative is not metabolized, it gets stored in that fascia, which then, from what I understand, causes that hardening, which then maybe restricts the energy flow.

And that then starts absolutely this cascade that maybe doesn’t happen immediately, but over years and years and years begins to [00:33:00] really have this super, you know, limiting negative effect on the body. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve, I’ve felt in my hands when. Things release and you feel that fluidity under your hands.

And um, I’m just thinking of, you know, this idea, what the reason that myofascial release the type of body work I practice is so amazing is that it creates this piso electricity. So it’s this pressure electricity. So when we put pressure into the system with our hands, then something happens where the fascia starts to create these electrical charges and.

Essentially what ends up happening is that it transitions from a more solid to a more liquid back to this liquid crystal, this highly structured water that our body is made of, and then eventually resonance where everything’s just kind of settled. You know, it’s like inner harmony of our body. And yeah, I absolutely believe that when we’ve had things [00:34:00] like a surgery, uh, I was talking this morning, I’m, I’m doing a body work training for PR pro uh, practitioners and, um.

I was talking this morning about how it’s not just that someone’s had a surgery, right? It’s like all of the things that surround that surgery. So it might be all of the fear that they felt before the surgery and that could be like for months and years or like not feeling heard by their doctors or whatever it is.

I’ve had, you know, clients who’ve had an appendix removed at five years old and go into a room and get left alone and don’t even really know what’s happening. You know, there’s like things like that. There’s so many different layers and that’s the beauty with myofascial release too, is we can feel that things actually come off in layers and it’s not necessarily that it’s just one emotion that’s in one release as well.

So like I’ve had my own. Experiences of a release just in the span of 10 minutes where I [00:35:00] felt first, you know, maybe some anger come outta my body and then it’s sadness and then I feel joy. You know, it can be like a whole range of emotions that are all tied up in either one part of the body well, and that one part being fascia because, and that’s like our whole body.

So it’s not saying it’s in, you know, the shoulder, the left shoulder or something, but like working in one part of the body. Um, and it’s just, it’s a, it’s a beautiful thing to see, to witness when that release happens and you see this change in their structure, kind of feel the life come back into them.

That’s always my favorite thing is like, just when clients say, like, I just feel so much more alive in, you know, my pelvis now, or whatever it might be. Yeah, I think what would be helpful, I’m so visual and I’ve never had myofascial work, but this is huge, huge, huge on my list, especially this year as I find myself kind of reentering some deep, deep tending to some early [00:36:00] childhood wounds and traumas.

I know that this is the next piece of the puzzle that I’m ready to integrate. Mm-hmm. But I think, so I can kind of wrap my head around it and the audience too. What, what does a session look like? And I think maybe what might be helpful is how is a myofascial release session different from something like a chiropractic or a massage session?

Yeah, so the main differences are that in a myofascial release session, I’ll just say when someone comes in for a session, they usually have an a standing assessment first to see. I try to notice. You know, what kind of misalignment is in their body, or I really just use my intuition to kind of look at their body and see if my eyes are drawn anywhere in particular, anywhere that there’s sort of like an aura mm-hmm.

Or energy in their bodies that might seem a little bit off. Um, and then the work is hands-on and it’s usually done with someone wearing some clothes. So a woman [00:37:00] would wear like a bra and underwear or shorts and a tank top, and so that we can see the skin and they’re not covered with a sheet, and I don’t use any oil or any sort of, you know, lubricant on their skin.

And so then from there, it’s really just me using my intuition to decide where to work first. And it might be as simple as. Kind of sandwiching my hands, say like one hand on their sacrum and the other hand on their low abdomen. And just holding there and feeling myself feeling for the restriction and the energetics of that area.

Um, there’s a lot that we do with this idea of, it’s kind of an osteopathic idea of a stuck drawer principle where like when you have a drawer that’s stuck, sometimes you have to push it in before you can pull it out. So rather than putting the body into a position where you are, where it might be kind of bracing and resisting, whatever the opposite way that they want to go, I will [00:38:00] first put them in the direction of ease.

So we like move them in that direction of ease. Mm-hmm. So someone might come in and they’re. Upper body might be twisted like this. That’s the direction I’m gonna start when I work with them. I’m not just gonna immediately twist ’em to the opposite direction. And so sometimes that can just kind of unlock their tissue and allow them to come into more coherence in their body.

Um. And the body, the myofascial work is full body. So it’s like cranial work. It’s, it can be, um, internal pelvic work. It can be really literally anywhere on the body. Um, and that’s an important aspect of it because you can have a restriction in one part of your body and it can tug into your body to a different place.

It’s important to keep a really broad perspective of their body and not think like, oh, this person’s coming in with shoulder pain. I’m only gonna work on their shoulder. Instead, we have to think like, okay, there’s something, there’s some pain in their shoulder. Let’s look around elsewhere [00:39:00] and see if we can find the root.

And that could be that their pelvis is out of balance. It could be that they have cranial bones misaligned. It could be really anything. And, um, I do love complimentary therapies like chiropractic and acupuncture, and myofascial release is really supportive. Of those therapies because when the fascia is more fluid, then a chiropractic adjustment will hold longer because essentially like the, the fascia is what is holding your skeleton in place so you can go and get adjusted, but if the fascial restrictions are continuing to tug you into misalignment, that’s often why you have to keep going time and time again.

So fascia work before chiropractic is great and before acupuncture as well, because acupuncture is working with the meridians and your meridians run through fascia. And so if you can release the restrictions around those meridians, it’s only going to help that therapy do what it’s meant to do. Mm-hmm.

Oh my gosh. I just, I love it so much. [00:40:00] Yes. Because even, you know, my mind is immediately going to, I think there’s. For anyone listening, it’s yes. If I have these kind of chronic or cyclical physical ailments I experience and nothing else I’m doing is fixing it, it might be time to try myofascial release.

But what I really hope people take away from this is if you have chronic or cyclical emotional patterns. Yeah, behavioral patterns. I think on top of at some point doing unconscious work. Cognitive unconscious work doing myofascial release too. I really, really do believe it’s all pieces of the puzzle and you know, we need different pieces at different times.

Yeah. And I just think that’s really important. ’cause I could hear anyone listening going, oh, okay. Yeah. I don’t really have any physical ailments right now, so I don’t know that this is for me, but I’ve been stuck in this chronic anxiety for 20 years. Yeah, absolutely. But I love what you’re saying because if someone, you know, I hear this a lot, you know, people who need to [00:41:00] get regular adjustments or the, the bones continue to shift out of place or regular acupuncture because their energy, their meridians keep getting outta balance.

And while it’s amazing that we have these holistic, non-toxic modalities to support that, we also need to be asking these bigger questions. Why? Why does it keep going out of place? Yeah. That’s not random. There’s something contributing to this. Why does my, why are my meridians continuously getting imbalanced?

What is going on deeper beneath the surface? Yeah. And I’ve had lots of clients who purposely come to me for emotional tending. You know, like they know that they can’t feel joy the way they’re meant to, or something like that. And I’ve, I’ve witnessed some miraculous healing around that. Just where they can feel that this, these dams that they’ve built up in their system, just start to start to let go a little bit and just allow a little bit more of that [00:42:00] fluidity through their body.

And yeah, it’s amazing. I mean, the, that, I think that was some of it for me was once that pattern shifted for me of feeling comfortable with stability, I suddenly could feel more joy. And that’s really like, I. I think that’s the goal of life, right? It’s just like to feel happy and joyful and enjoy your life.

Yeah. So anything we can do in regard to that, I think is always positive. Yeah. And they’re not finite. Literally on my website I kind of say like, the ultimate goal is that you have more joy, peace, and alignment. Yes. Yes. And those are not finite. If you, if you have so much joy already tending to some of these other things, there will just be even more of that.

It’s not like there’s a joy bucket that if you take too much Yeah. You’re gonna empty it. Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what, for me, kind of inspires me to continue the work because I love my life. I have a beautiful life and I still have patterns that show up. And so for me, it’s beautiful. [00:43:00] Like the next thing I choose to tend to, the next unconscious narrative I choose to sit with is only gonna mean even more joy, even more peace, even more.

Alignment. But it’s so interesting because I find myself, as I said, there’s been, there’s been some kind of recent upheaval with, with my father who was kind of our main abuser as a kid and mm-hmm. And it’s stirred up a lot of old things for me, and I feel myself going, oh, okay, this is like a deep, a deep tending time I’m entering into and with him.

There was, there was sexual abuse. And it’s funny because I’ve, I’ve found myself, you know, with a new partner recently, and it’s better than I’ve anything I’ve ever experienced in my life and I feel my body shutting down in response to it when you said that ability to receive joy. But what I think is so profound about this, and again, kind of unconscious cognition versus [00:44:00] unconscious physiology, what might be contributing, what has been really interesting for me to observe in these last few months is I’m very aware.

Of the patterns. And I do this unconscious work on myself often, but something about this new experience and how good it is, I feel my body is just like tightening up and bracing. Yeah. And my body is like, no, no, no. I don’t care what you say, what you think, what you do. This is not safe for me to receive.

Yeah. And that’s what’s kind of brought me to this, oh, it’s time I need to, I need to dialogue with my body. Yeah. No, that’s such, such beautiful awareness for you to have. And I can just absolutely relate and it’s so common that I see this amongst my clients where um, yeah. Even though you’ve, I’m sure, processed a lot around what happened to you in your childhood.

There can be these little aspects of us that, especially when the really [00:45:00] good things come in, it kind of flares up, it flares up that questioning we have of our worth and value, and do I deserve this level of happiness or whatever it might be. I don’t know if that resonates, but I definitely felt that myself.

You know, like I said, with this, when we could finally buy this land that we were dreaming about living on, it was like suddenly I was just kind of like, oh my gosh. It was like at the time that, um, my business was growing a lot and so there was just so much goodness. And then the interesting thing for me with that, that I realized too is like once I moved through that then, and it, it wasn’t that long after I moved through that, that we then conceived my daughter, my third baby, and I really feel like.

Something that she was kind of bringing into our family was like, yes, you can receive this goodness, and it’s okay for you, but I wonder for you. Like I, I just think I work so much with women [00:46:00] and the pelvic bowl and I just think, I think a lot of the pelvic bowl and how it really is a bowl. And I do think that it is a place that we store a lot of our emotion and our energy and it just sort of collects there because even though our legs are underneath our pelvis, it’s very much the base of us and the root of us.

And so if you had that experience as a child, you know, that would be, if you were my client, that would be my recommendation is to, is to really dive into your pelvis and just kind of see what it needs to speak and say very often there’s some mm-hmm. Some amount of just, um, holding onto there, whether it was.

Sexual abuse or for so many women, it’s just even some experience they had that was somewhat not consensual. Like where they weren’t a full Yes. Or where they were kind of in those early teenage years, maybe having a sexual experience where they were not really sure what they wanted. And you know, there’s just, there’s so much around [00:47:00] that.

For nearly every single woman that I work with, there’s something like that. For any of you who follow me on Instagram, you’ll probably have seen that a few weeks ago I did my first ProLon fast mimicking program and I was so blown away with how, how easy it was, how accessible it was. The unbelievable results that I experienced that I had to share it here on the podcast.

For those who aren’t aware, ProLon is a five day fast mimicking program. What blew me away was the impact because the magic of ProLon is that even though you’re eating, it has been scientifically developed to put your body into a fasting state. And when we’re in a fasting state, that is where so much magic happens in the cells.

We start purging dead cells, that autophagy happens. There’s so much cleanup that happens when we’re in a fasting state, and the only other way to get into the state [00:48:00] is to do a five day water fast, which is super inaccessible and hard. That’s not something that I don’t think I would even ever do. But I also did the in-body scan at Ascent adaptation before doing the diet and after doing the diet, because I really wanted to measure results and I was blown away, I lost six pounds just in that week.

I lost 2% body fat. But the other markers that I was really excited to track were my inflammation went down significantly. My phase angle went up significantly, which I’m gonna talk about a lot more because I decided I’m gonna record a short solo episode going super, super in depth into the ProLon fast mimicking program, and more in depth into my results and what some of these measurements mean.

But if anyone is interested and wants to learn more, click the link in the show notes below and that link will also give you 15% off your order. Once you click it, you’ll scroll down and you’ll see a little button that says Get 15% off. Their website is [00:49:00] packed with so many research articles and studies and information for anyone who wants to learn more.

Yeah, I think there’s the, you know, what are, what might be big patterns someone is experiencing, but the reality is we’re humans on this planet. No one’s getting out of, no one’s getting out of this life unscathed in some way. Yeah. Mm-hmm. That’s right. And none of us are getting out of childhood without some imprints.

So on the one hand it’s, Hey, if you are in deep distress, these can be powerful, powerful tools. And then also on the other hand, it’s. This would be amazing for anyone to do at some point, because chances are you’ve got something stored in your fascia for me, it’s chances are you’ve got something stored in your unconscious.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that if you are not feeling, what I like to say is like if you’re not feeling like really lit up by your life, like if you’re not feeling this creative energy flowing through you, and I think of it as our body being this vessel [00:50:00] for source, God, the universe, whatever you believe in, to just kind of come through and move us.

And if you are very restricted in your fascia, that can’t happen. And so you can feel this kind of like just dull blah energy, like not feel this creative, um, fire essentially. And that’s, that’s what I think of a lot with our bodies. Oh my gosh, I love that so, so much. I think something I might ask, I know there’s a million places we could go with this, but.

For anyone listening, I, I know you, you see people in person and I do wanna talk about some of your workshops and your intensive, that excites me so much. But I do think something would be, might be interesting is if someone’s looking for a practitioner, is there anything in particular they might want to be on the lookout for, to where they might know this is a really qualified person versus this is someone who’s sort of not really trained in it.

And then I also would love to ask if there’s [00:51:00] any, any little like take home, at home myofascial practice that you might be able to give us all to, to try. Yeah, sure. So when someone is looking for a myofascial release therapist, I would encourage them to look at the, the MFR directory, which is, um, a directory of therapists trained by John Barnes.

And it’s, I think it’s. Uh, I’m trying to remember the website. I think it’s, oh, I’ll find it. Uh, we can find it. Okay. So if you look at the directory, um, for a myofascial release therapist, that’s a good place to start. But then I really think it is an intuitive sort of feeling like you actually want to feel resonance with the person that you’re working with.

And I’ve been to a lot of different myofascial release therapists, and just because they have that training does not mean that I have resonance with. Nearly complete, [00:52:00] even probably half of them. So I think a lot of it just depends on the person. I mean, I, I am biased to believing that fascial work trained by John Barnes, that’s kind of, that’s like what I do and what I think is really valuable.

But I think you can have, um, really great experiences with any therapist who you’ve just had that sort of resonance with. And that might take going to them one time to know. But I would encourage when people are looking up someone on a website. Maybe listening to them speak on a podcast or social media or something like that to really just kind of like, feel from your heart and see if you feel this energetic resonance with that person.

I think that’s possible. Um, an at home practice that you could do, it’s, I think that easiest one, and I know that some people listening, or maybe most people listening will not be seeing us on camera, but an easy one that I like to do, and you wanna do it directly on skin, but if you take your hand and [00:53:00] put it kind of on your sternum, so on the top of your chest, and you can even put both hands there.

And if you just allow your hand to really sink into the tissue there and then traction downward, so you can’t even really see my hands moving, but I’m just kind of tractioning downward and giving a little bit of a tug there. And then what you can do is you can let your head move and create this stretch between your heart space and your chest and your head, and.

The thing with myofascial techniques is you wanna hold this for at least three to five minutes, so it’s a long time. Mm-hmm. Like 10 minutes is even better. Mm-hmm. And that’s how you really get into the collagen part of your fascia and get to this, um. This, there’s something that’s called interleukin eight that’s an anti-inflammatory.

Our body releases, and so you’d want to hold this, um, for at least a few minutes, and it’s okay if you let your head move. So I’m, I’m tipping my chin up towards the ceiling and extending my head back, and so [00:54:00] it’s creating this stretch through the front of my chest. And neck. Um, and it’s okay if you let your head move, but you wanna keep some amount of stretch there between your hand and your head.

And that’s just a way to get into, I think, into the heart space and just kind of see what’s present there. And probably if you do that one thing and hold it for that amount of time, you’ll feel some amount more openness in your chest. And from there you might notice other parts of your body kind of speaking up, like, I want you to work on this part or this part.

’cause once you work in one place, it’s kind of like, it opens the floodgates to your body just being like, oh, they’re there. This person is there now listening to me, listening to the tissue. And from there it will want more touch. Mm-hmm. And there is some amount of pressure. It’s, it’s not just resting your hand.

’cause that to me is kind of also distinguishing between maybe like reiki versus. [00:55:00] Myofascial. Yeah, it’s definitely more pressure than reiki. It is allowing your hand to sink in and find a barrier there. And so, um, this is what I teach in my classes, but, you know, I, I teach classes there two hours long, so it, you kind of need, it’s, it’s hard to describe in just a few minutes, but definitely you’re trying to find this place where there’s, where there’s a barrier where you feel like your hand is sinking into the tissue and then again, like it tractions and sort of pulls, but it doesn’t slide on your skin.

So yeah, it’s, um, mm-hmm. It is working energetically the way reiki does, but it’s obviously working with the fascial tissue and very often when I’m working on people, I can feel that there’s this. Energetic shifting happening under my hands. I can kind of feel the fluidity of their tissue and how it almost feels like there’s a river, like under their skin.

So I, [00:56:00] I know when we reach that resonance point because I feel this very, um, defined, kind of flowing between my hands, I guess I would say. Yeah. No, I think that’s so profound. So talk to us a little bit about your offerings, your workshops, these intensives. Yeah. Um, I have to tell you, the intensive is something I’m like, how can I make that happen for myself?

That looks amazing. Oh, yeah. It would be great to have you. Um, so the, the intensive or immersion that I offer that I call the deep alchemy immersion is a 10 hour, 10 hour treatment. In one week, I used to do 15 hours, but now I’m pretty set on 10 hours. I think it’s enough time for most people to really kind of break through their holding patterns, but that’s the idea with those intensives or immersions is that I.

It’s enough treatment that it, it doesn’t allow your body to continue to keep, keep going into that pattern. It [00:57:00] kind of forces through that a little bit. Um, and so that’s in person where I live in Vermont and then I do work with people just, you know, one-off appointments in Vermont and then I teach my classes online.

So I have myofascial breast care, um, internal pelvic care. So that one is really great for all women, but especially women who’ve had any sort of trauma and especially sexual trauma. You know, that’s one that I just think it’s really important that women learn how to touch their internal pelvis therapeutically.

And then I have a head, neck and jaw class. I have a pregnancy class and I’ve just released, um, fascia Care for Kids and Infant Fascia Care so that parents can learn how to do this work on their own children. And then my sort of larger group offering that I have is called Pelvic Alchemy, and it’s specifically going into the subconscious through these meditative journeys and, and doing the hands-on work as well.

But it’s specifically [00:58:00] to try to really get into those, those universal patterns of holding that I see in the pelvis, which I’ve come to decide are loss of support, loss of power, grief, and shame. And so I see this in all the women I work with, and so we go into these specific kind of meditative journeys, um, to, to allow our former selves to express themselves essentially, and to see those patterns shift.

Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful. Are, are all the courses ever green other than this, this alchemy course where anyone can just jump on or are they all live taught? So I, I teach the breast care, the head, neck and jaw and the internal pelvic class, um, once or twice a year. And I teach those live, but they are always available to get the recording online and the other ones are, are recorded.

The pregnancy class I recorded when I was. [00:59:00] 36 or 37 weeks pregnant. So I was very pregnant and I won’t be teaching that one live again. Um, and the, the kids’ classes is available all the time because that’s recorded as well. And pelvic alchemy. I do, I’m pretty sure I’ll just be doing that once a year in the winter months.

It feels like a really good start of the year practice to do because I love the like deep inward journeying that happens in it, and it’s a small group gathering that we have, so it’s a really special one that I like. Yeah. Oh my gosh, I, it’s so beautiful. Even when I was listening to some of your other episodes, I was like, they’re so, I love practitioners who are nuanced and there’s these elements of Yeah.

Spirituality and all these different things that kind of come together to create. A really holistic practitioner and I think that’s why the more I was listening to your conversation, preparing for today, the more excited I got to get to sit [01:00:00] down and talk with you. ’cause I think there’s just so much alignment in, in how we approach.

Tending ourselves and also kind of creating tending spaces for clients. So thank you so much for being here, Lindsay. Yeah, thank you so much. And I will just say that I think that, um, it also just, it’s a matter of the person wanting to go there, right? Like, I’m sure you see this too, but it sounds like people are seeking you out for this reason.

But, um, I’ve had clients that, you know, come in and they don’t have these big releases, and that’s just where they’re at at the time. And then I’ve had other clients that come in and they know they’re on the precipice of some sort of release that’s going to change their lives. And then they, they allow any of that to come up.

They just take the breaks off. And it can be just so beautiful and powerful when that happens. So for anyone that’s listening that feels like they want that, just know that you can’t always force it. It’s just it comes at the time that your body’s [01:01:00] ready for it. But when your body is ready for it. It will come up and it will allow you to be free of some of these patterns that are holding you back.

Mm-hmm. A thousand percent. It’s not about forcing it, if you know it’s, I, I really tend to take, and it sounds like you do too, that gentle approach of, no, we’re not here to strong arm the unconscious. We’re not here to, right. Because if there’s a protective mechanism, maybe that was three-year-old, you who created that, we’re not here to come in and bully her into submission.

We’re here to go, Hey, little one, what do you need to feel safe moving forward into a different narrative, into a different life, into a different future? And sometimes that little one’s like, I’m not even ready to talk about it yet. Sometimes that part is like, I, I need to just feel this for a few weeks before I’m even ready to consider different narratives.

Sometimes it’s, oh, I’m ready to go. Let’s shift the narrative right now. So, yeah. Yeah. But I think it’s loving a skilled practitioner who can. Sense [01:02:00] where you’re at, where your mind, body, and spirit’s at, and kind of give that gentle support as it’s needed. Yeah. I, I, 100% agree.