Healing Beyond One Answer: Lulu Elmes on Vision, the Nervous System, and Hope

Healing doesn't always follow a straight path. Sometimes the answers come one step at a time.

In this episode, I sit down with Lulu Elmes to discuss her remarkable journey through serious injury, vision challenges, and nervous system recovery. Along the way, she shares how CranioSacral Therapy, Hanna Somatics, Cymatics, and other complementary approaches became part of her own healing journey—and how those experiences now shape the way she helps others.

We also explore the connection between vision and the nervous system, why healing often requires patience, and the importance of becoming an active participant in your own recovery.

If you've ever felt discouraged because your healing is taking longer than you hoped, I think you'll find encouragement in Lulu's story.

Connect with Lulu Elmes

If you'd like to learn more about Lulu's work or connect with her directly:

📞 Phone/Text: 808-276-7005

 📧 Email: luease12@icloud.com

Please send Lulu a text if you email her, as she doesn't check her email regularly. A quick text letting her know you've sent a message is the best way to make sure she sees it.

Connect with Denise Allen:

Website: https://healingoursight.com/

Healing Our Sight Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063570817348

I'd love to hear from you! Click the "If you liked this episode, CLICK HERE" link above to send me a message. Your comments, questions, guest suggestions, and topic ideas come directly to me as Fan Mail, and I read every message.

Transcript

Denise: This is the Healing Our Sight podcast where we discuss vision issues and healing strategies from the patient perspective. The goal of this podcast is to create an awareness of the diverse types of vision issues people experience, to highlight the types of help available, and to open a dialogue between patients to show we're not alone in our vision struggles.

As a patient who gained 3D vision at age 54 through vision therapy combined with strabismus surgery, I feel uniquely qualified to offer a hopeful, balanced perspective on the possibilities.

Please use the link in the show notes to send me a message and thanks for joining me today.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Lulu Elms to the Healing Our Sight podcast. Lulu is a licensed massage therapist, cranial sacral therapist, Hana Somatics educator, ordained minister, and practitioner of Cymatics and bioenergetic medicine. Through her own healing journey, she has experienced recovery from trauma that affected her spine, vision, and nervous system. Those experiences have shaped her understanding of the body's remarkable capacity to heal and inspire the work she does. Today we'll hear her story and explore what she's learned along the way. Welcome, Lulu.

Lulu: Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Denise: Yeah, I'm very excited. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey that led you into this type of work?

Lulu: It was a long journey that led me into this type of work, and I think it was shunted at different times by different injuries and situations. And when I first felt that I was. I suppose I was reading about natural health while I still had a business making jewelry and painting. And I before that I was in the boat life. And once when I went to an assist at a craniosacral therapy training, when we've advanced a little bit, we can go and assist at the earlier courses, and it's always very helpful. And I had never driven in the snow before. I was on a road trip. And so I got there just as the teacher was finishing the intros, and she said, well, you're just in time to introduce yourself. I'm still standing. I just walked into this room with about 40 people in it. And she said, so, how did you. What's your background? And I said, oh, well, boats, really. And then she said, well, how did you get from boats to this? And I said, oh, I fell off one. And that was actually the moment that I realized that was when it shifted, because after this situation, I had fallen off a gangplank leaving someone else's boat. And actually, the gangplank had broken and it folded and it caught my feet and my body, and it was an upwards gangplank at a high tide, and my body kind of fell down like the hands of a clock, and my chin hit the dock and then went six or seven more feet into the water. And at first, I was thinking, I think I'm alive, I'm fine. And then I had this blue dress billowing around in the water, getting more and more red. By the moment, I think maybe I'm not fine.

Denise: No.

Lulu: And by then people were running around to fish me back out again. And they went to walk up the gangplank because it had put itself back in place. I said, don't, don't go there. And that's actually what changed my life, because I didn't know this would have been in the very early 80s in England. So I got a couple of stitches on my way to go for a two week visit to England before sailing across the Atlantic. And I said to the guy, my neck really hurts, you know, the little GP in England who took the stitches out. And he said, oh, you seem fine. Go off on your transatlantic trip. By the end of which I had so much neck pain. And in the months, a few months after that, I had something like a stroke.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And I gradually, over the years, we learn that neck has a lot to do with many things. My vision wasn't affected until a lot later, but then there were heart problems that really put me down for many months at a time and things like that. And I think each time something happened, one time was in a hospital because the heart people, the Spanish doctor said, you have to go to England and see a heart specialist. And they said, well, we've done all that we can do and we're sending you to the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases because we don't know why the heart is doing what it's doing. And they said, well, it's not a neurological problem either. We're sending you back and you get bounced back and forth. Now, in the last decade, cardiology and neurology have begun to speak to each other in mainstream medicine, but at the time they really literally didn't. I've had a doctor look at me once and I said, well, if it's not this and it's not that, could it be to do with the neck? No, the heart has nothing to do with the neck. Even recently, what's incredible is the ambulance people will say, have you had this before? And I'll say, yes, I have this neck injury, and it affects the running of the heart through the vagus nerve, et cetera, et cetera, and the bundle of his. And he'll say, oh, you've done your homework. And they cross me over the threshold to the emergency room. And the same the doctor will say, the neck has nothing to do with the heart.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And one of these days I'm curious to see what EMS, because that's it. That applies in England and in the States. I'm very curious to know what is in the EMS training that has them with this fundamental awareness that MDs in an emergency room don't have.

Denise: Yeah, that's very curious.

Lulu: It's a Bit scary.

Denise: Yes, it is more than a bit scary.

Lulu: I don't mind calling an ambulance, but I sometimes mind letting them take me anywhere because they'll only take me to a hospital. I had written some very nice thank you letters to ambulance crews who weren't allowed to take me anywhere.

Denise: Oh, it poses a huge problem, clearly.

Lulu: It does, it does, yeah. Really does.

Denise: So, as you did all of this work, it was for yourself, but then you became a practitioner to help others, right?

Lulu: True. Absolutely true, yes. I still lived on boats after the. That was. I was in my early 20s and then in my late 20s I got a cold, my mom got a cold, and I got much worse and she got better, which in the future wasn't the same. But then it turned into a serious problem for me. And then I just collapsed in the bathroom one night and my heart stopped three times, once in the bathroom and I hit everything you can hit going down from the towel rail to. And I was so messed up and I had total seizure. My tongue was bitten all around. And then in the er, my brother drove me quickly to the er. I can remember hearing things. He thought I had died in his arms because when he came rushing home, said, call an ambulance, she said she doesn't want an ambulance. And I'd fallen. I'd ended up in the recovery position. So, my mother was very cognizant that I was in a safe position, and I didn't want to go to a hospital. I kind of had a reason to know not to. And he ended up. He says he felt my pulse in my neck, and I just died in his arms. He grabbed me and rushed off to hospital. And then it stopped again in the hospital.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And that is when I said to my mother this. I said to her, I could hardly talk, but I said, I know something. And she said, oh, yes. I said, I know I'm going to come through this. I'm going to find a way to mend completely from this and then I'm going to be able to share that with other people. Wow. I can remember making that statement. And I still lived on a boat. I still had a canvas marine business. And it was after that that I moved into a jewelry business, which is a little bit less physically demanding than what I'd been doing before and had lots of freedom. So, if I had to stop for some time, I still had, like, things could still sell elsewhere and. But yes, I distinctly remember that incident being when I knew this was something I was meant to do. Right.

Denise: And you started out with which modality

Lulu: then really, I started out when I was trying to find. I mean, I also had a solar plexus injury differently. I'd fallen on about various different things. I don't know how I had so many injuries and still have all my limbs on. I have a girlfriend who says I have more lives than a cat, which is probably true. But I. I didn't train in anything for quite a while. I was so busy. You know, I would go to England from the Caribbean, and I would try to find other things and sometimes it would take months, and I just couldn't get right. I couldn't get. So, I could eat normal foods. So, my diet was all over the place. I couldn't go out and eat because. And then I was allergic to wheat. But I didn't know that for a long time. And it was really challenging for somebody who'd really never been ill. I mean, I had chickenpox and mumps as a kid. That was it. I'd never had an illness, and I hadn't had a serious enough injury to lay me up. So, it was really challenging to be going to all these different doctors trying to find solutions. And somebody said, I went to the ayurvedic clinic in London run by the TM movement and it's a significant clinic in. Really wonderful clinic, actually. And somebody said, try this lady Sally upstairs. And she was a cranial osteopath.

Denise: Okay.

Lulu: And my life changed.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: I could breathe, I could see. I didn't realize it till either later that day or the next day. It's like I've actually got life. And I. And it still was good the day after that and the day after that. And I went back up to see her after a week, and I think the second or the third time she was giving me this lovely cranial work. I said to her, is this, you know, it's not chatty work, quite focused work, and it's very gentle and it's very still.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: I said, is this a gift or is it something that one can learn? She said, oh, it's very scientific. It's absolutely trainable. It's absolutely learnable. And then began to tell me and teach me what she was doing because I asked her to. So really, I began learning it from her. Almost like when you go for any training, any hands-on training, you sort of learn the theory and then you give the work and then you receive the work. But you learn typically more receiving it than when you're giving it. So, one hopes that by receiving it you're then okay to give it. But that's when I began to learn. And then back in the Caribbean afterwards, fell off my own boat onto another one. When I wasn't in the normal place normally, I was out at anchor, and I just did that thing again. And in the aftermath, well, right after that, somebody said there was this doctor there who would really, really help me. And when I sat in his waiting room, I had this sense, oh, he's going to be one of those people who as soon as he meets me, he's gonna know everything. I could feel this quiet, extraordinary awareness before I met him, and it was absolutely true. And he was an osteopath with lots of cranial focus, and he was a doctor of Chinese medicine, and he was a variety of things. And one day I was in that town, I was on an island, and I was in the town and there was a shop that sold a lot of big white appliances. And I never went in there, but something made me walk in there and there was a lady wearing a sort of salmon colored outfit. And I thought, I don't know why I walked in here, and why would I be? I lived on a boat. I wasn't going to buy a great big washing machine. And I. Anyway, but I greeted her and said, she looked lovely in her color. It was so lovely. And then it turned out she was his wife. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. Within days of that, they were in a restaurant together and she was his wife. And I thought, oh, no wonder that energy was so powerful enough to actually suck me into a shot that I had absolutely no reason to go into. So those little incidences add up, and you begin to realize something about energy. Because back in the 80s, people didn't talk about yoga, meditation, or energy in the beginning. Then it got to be rare if you didn't. But energy is still a little bit, you know, a lot of people don't know where to go with it, you know?

Denise: Yeah. And I think some people are aware of the fact that they want to do something different than traditional medicine, but they really don't know where to go.

Lulu: Right.

Denise: And that's part of why I do this podcast, honestly, you know, because we don't just talk about vision therapy. We talk about all of these other modalities as well. And I mean, we have to start somewhere. We have to start with that thing that draws us in.

Lulu: Right, right. And vision is as holistic as anything can be.

Denise: Exactly. And you often use the phrase collaborative medicine. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? As it relates to our healing journeys.

Lulu: I can. I have to thank Columbia, South America, I think. I can't remember the first time I used that, but I can rem. The first time I used the word integrative medicine, and I had never heard it anywhere. I was in my car and I was turning around. I backed into a farm field or something, and I stopped and I called my friend because we were sort of very much collaborating about things together. And I said, it's integrative medicine. That's what it needs to be. It's holistic, especially. They took the W off the word. And then there's the alternative, which should be banished. And we were a bit frustrated about that. We were trying to think what we would offer on retreats that we were planning. And I said, it's integrative medicine. It's the working together of it. So then, nine years after my bad, really deadly spinal injury, which is. After which my vision was directly affected, nine years later, I was about one or two years into building. Not just I had my health and my mobility back, but now I was building my business of jewelry, which, when I thrived as a practitioner, thrived in general. I had my practice as a practitioner and a small cottage industry as the jewelry. It was cottage industry on a making scale, but it got pretty good on a selling scale. So, I always had an income, and I never needed to charge. I was often very well paid. I was very well paid in two clinics that I worked in at one time. And I was well paid privately, but I didn't have to be. I couldn't only see people who could pay me. And that was really important to me because there's a mode that I would sort of switch in, I just sort of ended up in that was to do with nothing to do with the cost of my time or the cost of the work.

Denise: Okay.

Lulu: And in fact, one of the clinics I worked in, the first time she came to me and asked me, the owner of the clinic, she said, do you mind if. Would you help this lady that doesn't have any insurance? And I said, of course. And from then on, I was the uninsured person. Yeah. Anyone that didn't have insurance got sent to me. And then at a later time, my mother fell. Nine years after that, my mother fell. And my mother had a really good head start with what to do and how to deal with it, because she already had various things, a bit of degenerative things here and some other things there, and the aftermath of a few little falls herself. And. But she really really, really hurt herself after this one. And then she, then she actually didn't want to live anymore. She asked me to accompany her to Switzerland for. To a place where they practice euthanasia. And I said, look, you've always said unplug me, I don't want to be this, that and the other, don't you know. And you even have said that couple that injected each other someplace or other, you think that they were smart. So, I said I believe that to help another is to help a person with what they truly believe is best for them. And I know that this is true for you so deeply that yes, I will accompany you. You have to get; I'll go down and get Rick to start taking over the business. Because by then we had jewelry, we had things coming in from Indonesia, we had all handmade with photographs of the artisans. We only handled things that people actually made themselves and where they really said they were made here, because they are here. And we photograph them. And then I said, so I can go away, but let me go and sort my life out. Ready for an indefinite absence while you get your sons and your brother all make them do the research for what happens at the other end. Because I don't think you show up like at a hotel and check in and say do me. I think there's a whole process you're going to have to teach me about it. You get to get it thoroughly and teach me what it is, and I will help you with it. But I've got to hear from them. Mommy wants to do this, and she wants you to help her. And her journey turned out to be the most extraordinarily rich, convoluted nine-year story.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: Sort of nine-year journeys. But her journey really piggybacked on everything that I had had to find and learn from my injury, that injury. And when that injury occurred, I already worked in two clinics, and I would go down to the Bahamas where they had these retreats, and we had 40 women coming on one of them and Andrew Weil coming another time. And they were very tremendous retreats in the winter because it was an organization from Montana and they didn't, they didn't have much happening in the winter. But then when they went to the tropics, then suddenly they had a lot happening and series of retreats and I was the in-house health practitioner for them. And I would go away for three weeks and the, the books would just fill in the clinics before and after my trip so I could keep doing things that was really wonderful. And then one time I came back in a different state and ended up going in through the front door because I worked with the Institute for Non-Surgical Orthopedics. And so, when you've been really badly injured in an orthopedic way, it's very helpful. And then something else shunted into the awareness of healing and injury and how things happen to us. This sort of. I can't pinpoint it, but it broadens the picture of how and why things happen to us. Because the lady, another lady was raped. And I had to identify the man in a lineup at the police station who had intruded on my cottage before they all arrived. And it was the same man. And I was right. And then I was in danger, of course. But guess what her profession was. She was raped and she was a rape counselor.

Denise: Oh, wow.

Lulu: And that hit me, like. And it literally just sort of cracked open whatever paradigms I had, which were pretty broad by then already.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: And it really makes you very, very still, especially when you're pretty crippled by an incident as to why it happened to you, you know, and it might be nothing to do with me or very little anyway. It might just be that it was going to happen to somebody, and a lot could be learned from it and a lot could be changed and improved because that place and that guy, they're not allowed to do those things anymore, that's for sure. But.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: Yeah. I still can't explain what it explained to me, but it was impactful.

Denise: Well, and all of the things that happened to you led you to doing all of these works that are integrative, right?

Lulu: That. Well, yes. And when we got to Colombia, and the reason we went to Colombia was that I. One of my doctors, the reason I took massage school in Florida, actually, was a doctor of. He was Armenian, Argentinian, a doctor of a neurologist and neurophysiologist in his country. And he'd taught A and P and massage school for years. And he was a dean at a Chinese school. He was a professor of homeopathy. He was like six, seven physicians in one amazing man. And I wanted to be in his presence. I wanted to be near him. And that was why I chose. If I wasn't going to be in the islands for six months or however. It was nearly a year, actually, I wanted to be where he was. And he, of course, got a phone call the day I was injured, and he came immediately to my family's home there. 

And he was remarkable. And he taught me about some German remedies made by a company called heal, who were in this country then and they're not anymore. And it was a sort of new generation of homeopathic, which now that's called low dose medicine because homeopathic specifically means homeopath, meaning like, heals like. And that whole principle, and this goes a little bit wider than that because they're working with the body's communicators and there's a company that is in this country called GUNA and they're working with cytokines and interleukins. And it's all beyond me, but when it gets explained as clearly as their teachers can explain it, I get it and I try it and it works. And I gave my mother. We did have a consult, and my mother was told to. We had four of these dropper bottles. She'd lost the use of her legs at one point, so she was in a wheelchair, leaning back and she. We took these little dropper things and they were timed specifically, but I was very diligent with them. And then suddenly one day she could lift her whole pelvis up and she'd regained the strength in her legs from taking drops, natural drops. If you drank the bottle, you just waste your money. So, all these things happened. I knew about them from my injury. We didn't have to go through eight out of nine years of exploration for my mom. We just kicked her right into it. And she changed her mind in South America because the doctors in the Caribbean, she'd been seen in Puerto Rico. And they said. But my brothers had moved her to Florida, and they got her a physician, a primary care physician who was open, which was very essential. And I said, if she ends up in an emergency room, you need a primary care physician in this country to be able to say, no, please don't give her that. She's going to take this. Because he's the only voice that can override them. Well, because he then was not only open, he wanted to study with them, he referred her to the Puerto Rican doctor that she was going to go down and see for a couple of months. And they had to cancel her appointments because the AMA would shut them down for treating an out of state patient. So now we know what we want. We're in Florida and we have no idea where to get it. And she was so much worse by now. She really was on her way out. But a death wish doesn't kill you, unfortunately. It plays hell with your health to the point that and my brothers weren't. I watched her try to get everybody aware of what was happening and it wasn't working, but she certainly tried. And I saw her, she started to drop things, and I thought, if she has a capacity challenge, like if she has a stroke or something, and people who often are dropping things a lot just before they have a stroke. And I just knew to get her out of the country and the doctors in Puerto Rico, I said, can I bring her if I take her back to the islands and then fly her in on a seaplane? No. Well, if it was your mother, what would you do? He's Latin. He has to answer, right?

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: He said, if it was my mother, I would take her to Cali, Colombia, and put her in the hands of this man of that clinic.

Denise: Oh, wow.

Lulu: And I ended up calling and researching and he said. I said, can we come? My brothers don't know anything about Columbia. They. It's just, you know, I met your director when he was teaching a course to physicians in the Caribbean. I know a lot about you, but my brothers know nothing. The whole family. Can I bring my mother for a week and come back out? Would you tell her what's going on and what you would do and what it would cost and how long and that would. Oh, no, you'll have to bring her for at least two weeks because everyone in the clinic, we're all under one roof, everyone will see her first, and then we'll all read each other's notes and have a meeting.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And I said, you'll talk to each other. And it's like booking a flight with the other hand on the other line. And they are where their business card is, for one thing. Medico, which is medical doctor. They're nearly all medico. Sirujano. They've all done elementary surgical training. 90% or 90 more percent have all also done basic surgical training. So, if something hits the fan, an earthquake, a war, they're surgeons, Right. Nearly all the doctors are also basic surgeons. And then their business cards, many, many, many of them say integrative medicine on it. Wow. And I nearly fell over. It's mainstream over there.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And all of this was how I ended up doing more and more because it had to be done by then. How I got into Hanna Somatics was that one day I was working in a doctor's office with cymatics using sound and things. And the massage therapist, He was a mature chap and a mature practitioner. He said he'd been going to these little evening classes at the community college that changed his work more than everything in 15 years put together. And I just knew it was good for me. And it was an introduction to Hannah Somatics with a short video of Thomas Hanna speaking. And I knew it was good for me. And the lady teaching it had a workshop coming up, a two-day workshop. And I signed up immediately. And halfway through the first day I was virtually catatonic. I didn't know what had happened. I can remember what the cement looked like between my feet and this voice that had been saying, louise, Louise, are you coming in? Are you coming back? And I was started to realize I had this feeling in my body that was awful. And it was like when I tried yoga. Shortly after the injury, I fell ill. It was the same sort of sensations. And of course, later in the Hannah Somatics training, they stopped people slamming all that work into two days for a random group of people because it was just too much, too fast.

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: So, I think one of the reasons I ended up with this sort of deep foundation under what I do is that my nervous system was affected by the bad injury so much because my spinal cord was stretched and I wasn't ambulanced or stretchered or anything either. So, it was really a bad, difficult recovery. And I think I've been old early. I have a way of sensing what an elder is feeling like and a sensitivity to sounds and temperatures and things that they're going to notice. And those around them that are in, the professionals around them are young and they're not and they don't notice them. Right. And it's not yet part of the training to be that sensitive.

Denise: Right. And so, at that point you did all of the Hanna Somatic training and started working as a practitioner in Hanna Somatics?

Lulu: No, I've been doing the Somatics work in great depth for 20 years before I, about 19 years before I trained. Because when I, when I had this experience and I thought, I don't know, I wasn't wrong knowing this is good for me, what's going on here? And I called the institute not knowing anything yet. And Thomas Hannah had died fairly recently then and sort of five people had just kept the institute alive. And they got to the phone when they could and eventually heard back. And I said, what's going on? This happened. And she asked about my injury, she asked about my practice and my trainings. And then she said, okay, I'm going to do something that we don't do. I have old cassette tapes when Thomas Hannah taught a series of lessons to a group of people all in their 70s. And you're going to do those little by little. And she said, you're going to take lesson one, and if you forget what he's saying, you're not going to treat it like music, don't pick up where you left off, and do something different. She said, as soon as you lose track, stop the tape, spin it back until you can clearly remember consciously knowing what they were saying and what you were doing, and take it back from there. She said, if it takes you several days and several goes to get through lesson one, fine. And after that, you're gonna go through lesson one again, and then on a different day, you're gonna start the same process with lesson two, et cetera. And I took time off work, and I did it every day and several times, and it took me three or four weeks, and several times my beautiful, beloved fiance came up to me and said, honey, you okay? It's just that you've been sitting on the sofa looking at the wall for two days, and I've been feeding you. So even working at that pace, because of what my nervous system had been through, and this was only four years after the injury, I could walk and talk and I could drive again, but I didn't know what real comfort was. I hadn't danced since the injury or anything like that. And I used to be, you know, in the earlier life, a gymnast, taught yoga dancing. And I didn't. I wasn't craving it, but I wasn't doing it either. And then when I went through this three weeks of Hanna’s work, which was very carefully designed from the core and the whole. What he calls the somatic center, which is our whole middle between below the ribs and above the pelvis is our somatic center, back, front, and sides.

Denise: Right.

Lulu: Leading slowly outwards. And really, really done it very diligently, very thoroughly. I was an inch and a half taller. My voice had changed. And my fiance said, the household has changed. I want to do it. We're going to do it all again together. And we did.

Denise: Wow. Yeah.

Lulu: It only took us 10 days the next time.

Denise: That's a. That's big progress.

Lulu: So I didn't train. Then I thought about it, but you had to go for a whole month in California and stay somewhere and all of that. And I was. And then my mother had her very, very bad fall, and we ended up in Colombia. And I shared about it with Colombia, and I began to lead people through the pieces that I knew a couple of the doctors in particular, and they wanted us to organize a training there in Colombia, and I introduced them to craniosacral therapy and Before I knew it, they had trainings happening. And it's such a powerful work when it's done as he designed it.

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: Really, really, really mindfully. And I didn't train until after my mom had been gone a few years. And then I got to be with my father, and he was turning 90, and I started to do the work with my father. And then I realized, okay, I gotta train now. There was a day when I knew I would take the training. Cause at first I didn't feel I needed to become a practitioner of that. I just knew it was changing my life. But the day I knew I would take the training, I took my mother across Florida to a practitioner, because there were two in all of Florida. And I told her this. I said, but so we don't need a. And I sort of. We were in Florida, sort of hoping to go back to Columbia. And I wasn't sure yet which side of her fence she was on. And I half expect now her. A painful elbow thing had come up again, really made her scream very miserable. And I half expected her to say, no, I'm not going to try anything else. Just take me to Switzerland. And she didn't. I said, this is that work that you love. You've heard his voice. And there are practitioners who've had three years of training, and they're deeply experienced, and they may be able to hone right in on this. And it's the one thing we can't get in Colombia. And she said, yes, okay. So, we rented a van and drove across Florida, discovered west Florida, which is completely different than east Florida, and went to this practitioner. And the first day. I know now exactly what she did the first day. She was working with her for about an hour and a half, including a rest in the middle. And the next day, my mother sat on her commode, which she could do. She could get herself from her sofa onto her commode herself and back. But she sat on the commode and she said, shall I let the pee come? And the caregiver I had with me; we brought a girl back from Colombia. And we looked at each other, and I said, you have a choice, because we had these pants on the sofa. Because she only got herself onto the commode because it was getting wet and warm.

Denise: Oh, wow.

Lulu: She had literally regained continent control overnight.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And I called up this lady, Joan, and I said, baas, this is what's happening. She said, well, yes. Remember when we had her doing all of this and then we had her rest a while, and we had her really wait and listen for when some sensations happened somewhere different in her body. Do you remember where she felt them? I said, yes, it was the right elbow. We were doing things, you know, in the torso and diagonally and sideline, and it was in her opposite thigh. She said, exactly. So, we worked with all the torso muscles diagonally, and we inadvertently included all of the continent control muscles.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And I said, oh, I gotta train in this. And then it was a matter of when I was available and not only to go get to the place, but you do this now, it's two weeks, twice a year, but it's lots and lots of practical mentoring and talking with the teachers in between. And we're writing a dissertation on neurophysiology. So, it is a capacity question. It is being available to go through the training. And that took me a bit longer.

Denise: Yeah, that's so fascinating. I'm really curious about the vision issue that you mentioned, because since we're talking about vision in my podcast, usually, what was the vision injury that you had, and how was that helped by these different modalities that you explored?

Lulu: Yes. Well, the first time I thought, oh, I've got a problem, was crossing a road. My brother was holding my hand, and we were crossing a road together a matter of months after the injury, when I was still. Probably within two months, I was still walking. And then what happened was that because with the impact from that particular injury, it had injured a ligament on the back of my pelvis or the top of my pelvis that shortened as they do, and it had gradually used up all the elasticity in the hamstrings, which are very long, and the spine muscles, which are very long, until there was none left. And then it went clunk. And it knocked my sacrum, tilted it, rotated it, and it was like having a dislocated pelvis. So, then I was flat for a long time. But in those couple of months I can remember, we were halfway across the road, and I suddenly grabbed, squeezed his hand, said, oh, God, I can only see a dot in front of me. He says, all right, hold my hand.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: That was the first I thought, whoa. Realizing neck might have something to do with it and knowing that cranial nerves have a lot to do with a lot of things as a cranial practitioner. And then that kind of thing used to happen intermittently. And the next thing I noticed was that computer use, and I had an old PC at the time. I had about 15 or 20 minutes, and then my eyes hurt, and it took a bit for me to realize, oh, this is a problem. And then somebody lent me, they had me try on a pair of pinhole glasses. And he was doing this geometric thing with lots of arrows at the computer, with little formulas and shapes and angles. And he was all these hours at the computer because of those. He said, try these. And you put them on and you see this black thing and a bunch of holes, and then you focus on something through the holes. And it's amazing that you can read, and you can see like, wow. So, he got me a pair and those with Those I had 45 minutes or an hour on the same screen. And then I got better computers and better screens, but those were huge, huge. And then there was a time later when I realized there's a lot more to it than anything physical. And there is a lot more to it than just the neck, the nerves, the eyeballs, that it's a lot. And I was in Colombia quite a few years into my mother's, probably year six or seven of my mother's nine-year saga. It was a saga. And I had hosted somebody and I'd had to cancel it. And a university in Bogota had taken them on and they were flying me over there. It was the one piece of my life that hadn't been cancelled when my mother had been put in a nursing home and gone basically to hell in a handbasket. And now we were recovering open wounds and all sorts of things from what happened to her there. And I was so exhausted, I can remember saying, I can't see and I feel like my brain isn't working. I was trying to pack and looking back, I realized it wasn't just that I couldn't see, it was that I couldn't remember what I'd just put in the suit. The whole brain was so fatigued. But I kept saying, I can't see and I feel like my brain isn't working. And I went off to Bogota. My mother was staying in a wonderful place, and it was fine. And the last Bogota was a conference about violence. Interestingly enough, of course, that's what had happened to me. And the faculty founder of Human of Public Health, had organized something involving five Latin American countries and multiple universities to hone in on this issue of violence, what causes it, perpetuates it, images of all sorts of things. Fascinating. And he said, oh my God, I don't have the closing keynote speaker. You know this guy. So, yes, that's who was going. And I was being flown up there to host this person and accompany him and translate. And I'm Trying to pack and can't see or think, and I'm there. And my role there was very clear and it was very fascinating, but it was one of the people I knew. Well. The circle of doctors from Cali went into some serious PTSD. And I realized he'd been through some tremendous violence in his life. And my mother, of course, was in this place to try to heal her open wounds. She was going screaming in the night from them. And I think I couldn't stand to see any more suffering. Yeah, it was the last day of that week, going to the airport. He was there four days. And I had a day off and rested. And then I got to the airport, got to the doorway between where the taxi dropped me off and going into the terminal in Bogota and suddenly couldn't see. And I sort of reached both hands out and literally couldn't see. And one landed on a door post, and one landed on a boy. The little boy said, oy, senora, my mom works here. Do you need a wheelchair? And I was like, of all the little boys in the airport, is there an angelic presence or not? Well, that would be a very good idea. So, he took my hand and he came off his shoulder, and he carefully put it on the doorpost and said, can you stand there a minute? I said, yes. And I stood there clutching onto this doorpost, and he went off, and this lady came with her little boy and a wheelchair. It was quite magnificent. And as I stood there and once, I was sitting, once I was sitting, I realized, okay, there's something moving. And it was like I had a kaleidoscope and somebody filled it with black, old used motor oil. But there were bits of red floating around. Well, that was the avianca sign.

Denise: Oh, wow.

Lulu: Which is red. And that was it. So, I saw doctors and they said, maybe would you like to stay in Bogota and see some doctors here? And I said, well, from what you can sell, I've got doctors and friends and family and home and everything. And if I can get this half hour flight, unless it would blow up my eyes or something. But what's gone wrong? They said, oh, we don't think it's something on that level. We don't know what it is. And yes, if you've got all that in Carlitas, maybe you should get the flight. We'll just put you near the front where they can see you all the time. And I got there and I could see more, but I couldn't see where I was going or who was moving or was I just clutching Onto the luggage cartoon. It was pretty crazy. And so. But I kept thinking this is because I couldn't stand to see any more suffering.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: By then, my mother had been through so much suffering in this country and so much recovery in that country. And this time the recovery wasn't just sort of happening in two or three weeks. Too much damage had been done, and it really was damage. And then when I eventually went to England, because of my eyes, my mom was very happy where she was staying. It was a Seventh Day Adventist healing center.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And she said, oh, they pray every time they come near me, but they never try to indoctrinate me. And they were all about natural health and the diet and the food. The first time we went there for lunch, we had this food. It's like, what's this delicious orange? Oh, that's carrot. I mean, everything was plant based. The whole thing. They taught us lots. But she loved being there. She was out in the country. The people were so kind and plenty of them. And so she stayed. She said, no, go to England and see your teachers and see your doctors and see if you can sort this out. So, she didn't actually see me between the Bogota thing and a longer absence in England, but she was okay. And Dr. Manners. Cymatics is the work of five people who he used to name and attribute the development of it to, but he was the one who really turned it into medical equipment that you could use these sounds and recordings. Every commutation or sound treatment was made up of five frequencies. And that's because everything that was ever recorded in their knowledge planet, muscle, plant, cell, the sound came down into five wave bands, five frequencies. So, everything was made up of five. And by then I had inadvertently earned a doctorate in Cymatic and bioenergetic medicine because I had traveled with him, I had hosted him, I'd gone and lived in and worked with him and interned, basically, which you didn't have to do. But I was so fascinated and I couldn't afford everything that I got. So really, because I needed the work, a lot of it, to heal my spine and my nervous system. That got me trained in that. But I had no idea how much I was training. And he said, remember that we don't look at things as other medical approaches do we know of. And that's so far. Five causative factors of vision problems. It's affected by the liver; it's affected by the neck. It's affected by the spine. It's affected obviously by the optic nerve itself. And then I added that it's affected by the emotion and the psychology.

Denise: Okay.

Lulu: And I also. The other, the fifth at the time was adrenals. And I had had an experience earlier where I'd been given by a practitioner bovine adrenal extract, which would be a bit too much of a punch for me. Now, homeopathic is kinder, but I would drive up the highway in England going for treatments. Two-hour drive, and halfway up the highway I would start to get a bit blurry and I thought, okay, well, we'll pull over on the hard shoulder, chew some bovine adrenal extract, and my vision would come clear.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: While I sat in the car watching the cars go by now, they became defined and the focus was clear again, chewing bovine adrenal extract. So, the adrenals have this direct effect on the pupil dilation muscles and I'm sure a lot of other things. But yeah, so he said, we look at all of that and we have to approach it, understanding all of it. So, it was music to my ears to hear that the world of opticians and ophthalmologists has become or is fast becoming the world of vision therapy. Because it is. And vision and sight have to be thought of as different.

Denise: Right? Yes. I think that is fascinating. You explained the whole situation, but what did you attribute the cure of your vision to exactly?

Lulu: I don't know that there was only one thing. I will. Oh, I do know what happened. I will say that without pinholes, I don't know that it could have happened, partly because I don't know how I would have got around anywhere to get anything done. But the pinhole glasses were absolutely huge. And when I was in England and I'd seen Dr. Manners and I had actually, this got kind of put back on my calendar because Dr. Gary Buchanan came into this life also with a lot of knowledge and he lived at the Edward Casey place for 20 years. And so just as Dr. Peter Guy manners came in with some things from a bigger picture and turned it into the Cymatic Medical treatment, so did Gary Buchanan, and they hadn't met each other. I was asked in Colombia if I would treat a cancer patient, and I said yes, he did train me on that. And I realized, well, he had died and Dr. Manus had died and I'd like a bit of company. So, I called around wherever I could find a practitioner, hoping I'd find somebody else. So, a bit of feedback and somebody to talk to. Nobody had touched it because they'd be shut down. And then one lady said, call this guy Gary Buchanan, he's just written a book. It's taken him 30 years. And I called Gary Buchanan and he dedicated the book to got Dr. Manners and oh no, we don't treat cats. So that didn't help that way. But he does have somebody that he sends his cancer people to. But that was how I ended up getting the Sona therapy things. And now he's passed as well. But he said that we're going to England to meet Dr. Manners. Would you like to come and join us there? So, I got to go and be present when Dr. Gary Buchanan presented this two-inch book that weighs five pounds to Dr. Manners. That was his life's work. And I got to see Dr. Manners summing the pages. And a lovely Japanese doctor, Dr. Yukinawa, I can't pronounce his last name. We call him Dr. Yuki. He has three cymatics clinics or he did have then in Japan from his own experience with Dr. Manas and a baby. So, the three of us, these two men were meeting each other and going to present this book to Dr. Manners. And I got to go. Mummy said, no, no, no, I don't think you should have had to cancel that. Anyway, you go and yes, you stay. So, while I was in this little English town, energetically, something was so. I don't know what it was. It was sort of. I was one with it. I think it was because I was in the English countryside and I hadn't been for years that did something vibrationally, really holistically. And I. This is. Oh, my God. I was drinking it in. And we were walking through a little town, and I was holding somebody's hand because I couldn't see much. And there were these gable buildings, and it was lovely. And so, I stayed there when they went away, I stayed there. I just didn't want to leave. And then I walked through the town I could see. And out in the country, when the sun shines, you can see a lot. And I could see hills in the distance and new things. So, each day I could see Seymour. And I was walking through the town to get a coat from a thrift shop, which was very successful. And I saw at the end of an afternoon raining, this Christmas card scene, you know, it's all wintry and there's this golden glow. And I went in and they're pouring little things. And I said, oh, sweeties. And she said, no, not sweeties, Chinese medicine. You want treatment? And I said, oh, no, no thanks. And I thought, well, why not see what they'll think of these pulses? And they had a Chinese doctor. England's got a lot of Chinese medicine in it. And they've got a lot of Chinese doctors and teachers who hardly speak English. It's really getting easy to get to in England. And there's this gentleman who speaks no English at all. And his friend translates. The friend's wife pours little candy bars which are out. And he said, put your wrists on these little velvet pillows. And he very soon said, 40% river. 40% of the cause of this. I said, well, no, I don't have an illness. I don't feel bad, but I can't see. So he feels these pulses. He says 40% liver. What would you do about it? He said, well, you're visiting and you're in a hotel. I said, stop, please. Could you translate my question for the doctor? If he was teaching in China and this condition came along, what would he tell his students is the ideal treatment? Protocol, timing, everything. So, he translated, and his answer was, 21 days every day. Don't skip a day. So, I called Mom. She said, yes, I stayed in a bed and breakfast instead. And I walked there every day. And they opened on Sundays. And it was absolutely amazing. The first couple of weeks I was in the same hotel because I knew my way to places. There was a big stone wall. You could just follow the stone wall to the crossroads and then cross one road and get there on the left. It was. It was very easy to do. And because of that, anytime anybody's going to have treatment from hardly seeing, stay in the same place and walk where you're going to. Because something magical happens. I remember coming out of the hotel one day and going, oh, pretty cars. Because back then you had colored cars, like, not like now. And then another day I came out and said, people. And I was so childlike with this returning sight and returning ability to see the world that I was saying these things out loud like a child, like, oh, people in the cars. And then I was walking along the longer stretch along the stone wall. And it was an easy to see curb. Cause it stepped right down to the road. And I. And it was a sunny day. And across the other side of the road was a river with weeping willows. And I could see the water. And I couldn't walk. I stopped. I couldn't move. It was such beauty. And to be able to see all those things again, having not been able to see. And this was just from having this Chinese medicine treatment every day. That's the only thing that was different. On a very cold evening coming back, I Had to put the pinhole glasses on. I usually did, especially crossing roads, because if you have a pair of black glasses on and you look useless, somebody will come along and help you cross the road. And I always did that. But the other thing that the pinholes did and that I realized was a significant factor was my eyes got cold. And when my eyes got cold walking home, I couldn't see again.

Denise: Oh, wow.

Lulu: And when I put the pinhole glasses on or I took a break on the walk, it wasn't a long walk. It was probably the equivalent of, you know, what you might call 10 city blocks. It wasn't a huge, long walk, but I did step into somewhere cold and I said, would you mind if I warmed up before I walk anymore? And when my eyeballs warmed up, I began to be able to see again. And then with the pinholes on, to keep this sort of warm bubble behind them, I got the rest of the walk done. But that was already in, you know, the second or third week. So, the temperature's a big factor. Getting your eyes cold is not good.

Denise: Mm, okay. Wow. That's. I, I'm. I'm trying to visualize how people would apply that to their own healing, you know, because not everyone's going to have access to Chinese medicine or, I mean, they can get pinhole glasses. Certainly, they can apply some of the natural vision healing techniques that, you know, some of the other practitioners encourage people to do. But that's very specific as far as how that helped you.

Lulu: Yeah, it got me 40% back. It wasn't all back. Another thing I learned that was huge was my atlas. And this was like reverse was somewhere for my mother. When we'd gone to see the Somatics practitioner, we were staying in St. Petersburg, Florida, and somebody was in a meditation community that I like to look up when I go to places. And she recognized me from when I lived in mountains upstate New York once. And I said, well, so when you left after 20 years in the organization, you could have gone anywhere. Why here? She said, oh, my doctor. Well, the chiropractor up there was an atlas orthogonal specialist and his teacher was at the Pierce Clinic in St. Petersburg, Florida. And so I thought, oh, yeah, that might help my mum. She said, no, I mean, for you. Didn't you have an eye problem? And so I went there for me, and I couldn't get there the first trip. It was only, you know, half hour drive from where we were staying to where this clinic was through the town. And I was a basket case. I had to pull over so my whole being knew something was going to. So there's this energy factor again.

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: You know, when you've had a serious injury, it can. Later. Somebody did a different thing, and she said to me, it's as if another you was inside you. And I watched her come out during this session. So, there was some presence in me that knew it was going to be got at. So, something about my blindness, the injury, the residual injury, and everything was about to change. And the presence of it had become an energetic factor that had almost become an entity that knew it was about to be eliminated.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: Because I could not get to the clinic. I had to call them up. I was bawling. I was in total PTSD. I was literally. I could feel the guy's hands on my neck. I could feel everything. I said, I'm not going to be able to get there. We'll have to reschedule. And I'm not going to be able to tell somebody what happened to me. Because the atlas is the bone at the top of the neck, and when it's out of place, it causes mayhem. We're not taught much. Not only does the spinal cord send the communications down through the middle of it, it’s got these two little holes in the bone on the sides through which the vertebral arteries go up and feed the brain and everything else and all the cranial nerve functions. And so, everything gets affected when your atlas is just a little bit out, because once it's a little bit out, the body will start to change, and it will get more and more out. And so, the second journey, I pulled over again and I said, it's almost as bad I'm not going to be able to come, but I'm wondering something if this is up again, what if I don't come to the physical appointment today, but if this is going to be intake and, you know, the assessment and everything, can I just. I got to stay parked on the road wherever I bowled over. Can I do that bit by phone now while it's up? And once that's done, and I know I don't have to talk about it, I might be able to get to the physical appointment for the treatment another time. And that was what we did.

Denise: Wow. Okay.

Lulu: And I couldn't see when I was pulled over with all the trauma. And after talking about it, I could.

Denise: Okay. Wow.

Lulu: So, there isn't one cure that I experienced any more than there was one cause, right?

Denise: Yeah. And I think it's important to kind of apply that to ourselves in a way that maybe people can grasp. We look for one answer all the time. Right. People go to one doctor and they say, tell me what I need to do. Give me an answer. And it's not necessarily going to be one answer, and it's not necessarily going to be only one doctor that can provide a part of the answer.

Lulu: Right. And the muscular factor isn't taken into consideration by most OPTI practitioners. It just isn't right. And it's vast because as Dr. Hanna said, he has this sequence of eight lessons. It's in the book. I don't recommend doing the movements from the book. I know a lady who came to me, having done the movements from the book for 20 years and never got very much benefit. And she had a friend who was transformed after several sessions. So, she said, what's going on here? Well, that's because she did them quite fast, quite differently. A couple of them. She didn't get the right message at all. It was very strange. So, I don't. I always wanted to tear them out of the book before I ever lent it to anybody again. But in the lesson, which they're all lying down until lesson six out of eight, and lesson six, which we're going through right now in Elissa's sequence, is, as you know, it's twisting and turning and it's upright.

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: Now you're knowing more about why I took this lesson into something so gradual and so thorough.

Denise: Yeah. And let's tell my listeners what we're talking about here, because I mentioned in a previous podcast that I'm doing some natural vision improvement work, and then I'm doing the Hanasomatics. Right. That I'm doing Somatics with Alyssa. And I don't know if I mentioned the additional class that we're doing that you're involved in. And so, let's catch my listeners up a little bit. There's a section of. We're doing like 10 classes,

Lulu: Right They were 10, and now I think it's become 13.

Denise: Okay. Anyway, a series of classes that have been available for free, actually, and I've been attending. I've attended most of them, and it's been really revelatory for me to have exposure to all of these other teachers. And I really enjoyed your class on Monday, and I'm looking forward to the one next Monday because it's giving additional insight and a deeper awareness of how everything's fitting together. And I think it's really great. Can you give my listeners a little bit of an idea of what that might look like? Because I don't think anyone has any conception of what happens in a Somatics yoga class.

Lulu: Sure. And there's Somatics and Somatic yoga. And somatic yoga is Eleanor Criswell, Hanna's baby, because she.

Denise: Which is what I've been doing with Alyssa. So, this is different because what we're doing on Mondays is just the Hanna Somatics.

Lulu: It's pretty specifically the Hanna Somatics. And because we've come upright in lesson six, and we're basically doing a vertical twist. And when he taught this, he taught it all to one side, so the brain got all of that, and then the next day, or a different day, the people could replicate it, or he taught it the other side. And I've been working with some two people in particular in their late 70s, both that come from 50-year embedded patterns that had made them both slowly really crippled. There was no big bad injury. There was no one incident. They just had got out of hand. One of them was having injections every couple of weeks. The other one had a breathing machine and couldn't lie flat even on her side. And the difference is extraordinary. And when we went through lesson six, I realized this has gotta be almost only glimpsed at one of them couldn't compute any of it. And the other one could, but there was another one that she couldn't compute. And both of those lessons, and they're the. They're the ones that take you vertical.

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: I have ended up teaching them in little bits. And in the case of lesson six, we do a piece of it and then we do that piece of it on the second side, turning the other way in the same session. But there's a comment Thomas Hannah made when he taught those people, and he said, he gets people coming back to him and saying, oh, you've cured my eyesight problem. And he says, well, I haven't done anything with your eyesight. I've just released your neck. I've guided you to release your neck muscles, so your eyes are no longer under the tyranny of your neck muscles.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: And it's huge because my eyesight also was vastly different when I had first done that slow, thorough, seated, twisting movement. And in my case, maybe because I'd been a gymnast and we'd lived on boats for years, so there's a lot of balance going on. And I had taught yoga lots of things before I was ever injured, as well as lots of cranial work and other advantages. I was fine with it. I just was so transformed by it. But these ladies each at a different time now are coming back around lesson six. We've gone through the whole thing at a better level now. They can get off their chair, one of them go on the floor. They can do it in a different way, but they can hear it in a different way. And the one who couldn't compute any of lesson six, who has a lot going on, shoulders up, is really taking it very, very slowly. And they are having one transformation after another. They didn't come at this with vision problems, except that this one had double vision a lot.

Denise: Wow.

Lulu: And she said. After a couple of times, she said, my double vision's gone away.

Denise: That's awesome.

Lulu: Yeah. But she's actually the one who in particular had me do a little bit of this on the one side and rest and do that little bit to the other side. And they are different from side to side. Different parts of it are different from one side to the other. It's tremendous. It's profound in its effectiveness. But anything that gets you going upright and moving your head and your torso, you start to bring in all the cranial nerves.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: And all their friends. You know, it gets to be a whole different ball of wax.

Denise: Yeah. Can you give my listeners any specific thing that they can maybe start with? Or is it better to just find a practitioner or join our class or what do you say?

Lulu: It's ideal to find. If you're dealing with vision. It's ideal to find a practitioner. And it's good to find a practitioner. If it's ideal to find a practitioner who might have a relationship with the profound connection between vision and Somatics. Because it's not just the muscles. The other thing that goes on with Hanna Somatics, the way he taught it and the way Eleanor brought in. She brought in the yogic aspect to it and brought it into the yoga. And she's. I mean, Eleanor Criswell, Hanna, who she. She used to manage a part of the Sonoma State University, and he was in charge of a department in another university. She read something he'd written and found him. She tracked him down and said, you need to write more. Then they founded the Somatics magazine. This is decades ago. And they published the Somatic magazine and they worked together. Then they were married. And I think that it was the Sonoma State universe. Anyway, so she brought movement into the world of psychology.

Denise: Okay.

Lulu: And that faculty from Sonoma State became Saybrook University. And so, she's known, at her memorial recently, she was referred to as the mother of Saybrook University. So, she has the Somatic movement, the yoga. Because Sonoma University, the head of the university, had said to her, if you could teach anything you like at a university level, what would it be? And she said, yoga. So, she. And she wrote the book How Yoga Works, which was published in 1981 after 16 years developing it. So, these profound bodies of work came together. And the thing is, when you're doing Somatics, people who've never meditated discover all sorts of things that people who start meditating discover. They find themselves with greater capacity, more awareness. They're more of a witness to themselves, their lives, their thoughts. If there's little bits of trauma or some sad memories, sometimes if they hadn't done their practice for a few days and they come back to it, they might have a weepy moment in the middle of nothing. Why? Because it's profound and it really is very, very holistic when it's done according to the way he designed and taught it. Right.

Denise: Yeah, well. And I can feel from how you described your work with those older ladies that this is something you really have a passion for in your work.

Lulu: And a caution. Okay. I think they. And one of them is a retired teacher, and one of them is a retired nurse, and their best friend from school days was a very, very close friend of Eleanor's.

Denise: Okay.

Lulu: And somehow, she asked me if I would work with them both. And it's been such an honor. And I believe that they and I are going to co-write a little book that talks of lesson eight, which takes you up into the walking and gait situation, and it brings in some of Eleanor's deeper, later teachings about the gate cycle. And now that we. We. We're doing much more with lesson six than we thought we would be because it's showing up for us. We haven't even gotten back to lesson eight yet, but we knew when we did lesson eight that we're going to do one little piece that you do lying down, the back front part of walking. And then we're going to do that vertical with chairs set up like bars, walking bars, so they've got some support. And we're ending up giving even more detailed treatment to lesson six, which is this vertical turning, one that he knows affects vision. So, yes, there are a couple of movements that can begin to make the change that can be done seated and that can also be done lying down. And if you have a neck injury, I suggest you start with them lying down. Because my first time doing these vertical movements with head and shoulders, raising the shoulders and things, I got up and went launching into palpitations afterwards because obviously my atlas was out. That was on day one of the training and at other modules. My girlfriend was on sky later, she's going, hey, Lulu. To be careful, it's the neck movements. Because she knew a lot about me and she knew it could have an effect. So great caution. And yes, there are a couple of movements with shoulders and neck that can be taught audibly, that could be taught in an environment like this, either now or at a different time. I don't like to do them in a big hurry, but they can be definitely taught over something audible like this.

Denise: Okay, well. And we've talked for a long time today, so I don't think that we're gonna have the time to do that today to do it justice. But if someone that's listening today has been feeling discouraged about their healing journey taking longer than they expected, what kind of encouragement would you want to give them? As we wind things up today,

Lulu: I would say a couple of things. I remember Dr. Gregory after my injury, it was probably nine months after my bad injury, and somebody carried me up to where he practiced. And I knew that Christmas was coming. And somebody said, oh, you got a different vehicle that you can get in and out of between Christmas and New Year. So, I asked the dog, because he had such a good view of what was going on with me neurologically, will I be well enough in about four weeks to go to the sales and get a better car? And his wife was translating because he only spoke Russian and her words were, and I relay them to you, she was in tears. She said, doctor says he, this is nothing less than reconditioning the central nervous system. And it will take time. He said, doctor says it will take time. And the most important part of your healing is to surrender to that and accept that it will take time and apply patience. Because there's a lot of healing happening in our bodies. Our bodies were designed to self-regulate, self-heal. You know, Thomas, Hanna used to get on his little soapbox, self-regulating, self-monitoring, self this. Well, self-healing. We are a self-healing, self-regenerating organism.

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: And craniosacral therapy has a nickname, which is your inner physician. And Hanna Somatics is a self-practicing, very gentle way of life in the end. But it's very slow, gentle movement done with tremendous attention.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: And so, it's about paying a lot of attention within. It's about knowing that you are your greatest ally, your greatest physician, your greatest healer. You are the healer. And the other thing is not to shotgun it too much. Like if you start something new, be with that one new thing for a while.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: Really get to know it and get to feel it. Because it takes time. Eleanor used to say, the brain learns slowly. And it's true. On the one hand, when we do a movement on one side or with one of our two limbs, if we have two arms, two legs, we do one. We always take time between one side and the other to feel it. Because a minute of deep breathing and self-sensing when you've done something to one side is huge. Because you notice all sorts of differences that you wouldn't have noticed if you'd gone ahead and done the other side. And then you go, oh, yeah, everything feels a little better or nice. Broad term, oh, it feels a bit. So yeah, it's a bit flatter. And with some prompts you might notice some details. But when you do something to one side or turning your eyes and your head and your neck to one side and then you pause and lie down and feel what you notice. You might have sensations in your feet, but you're more likely to feel more detail when you have one side having done something and not the other one yet. It's a golden opportunity. And Eleanor also used to say, you know, when we notice something, neurons are already firing.

Denise: Yes.

Lulu: The motor planning of a movement is part of the movement. And if people are very delicate and it's taking a long time, they might be doing too much. Because what makes it take a long time sometimes is I got this flash that I'll share because one of these two ladies said, no, I'm doing fine. After the rest, let's do a bit more. This is how we discovered how to break down lesson six. This is really. When I said, I'm never doing that again, I believed her and I trusted her and I went along with her, which is perfect. She is her. And they both have become very good self-practitioners before this already. So, I respected it. Well, then the outcome of it was she didn't need any help for a couple of weeks. That was great. She's getting better. And she came back, she said, well, there's a part of it I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. Can I have a session? I want to show she could remember the beginning and the last piece. And she totally spaced out on everything in the middle and wondered why she wasn't doing the last piece easily.

Denise: Yeah.

Lulu: So the sequencing is very, very significant. And if you just do a little bit at a time and give it a few days of settling with a craniosacral therapy session. We know that the session actually carries on happening for two full days.

Denise: Yeah, that's a lot.

Lulu: So, I prefer not to see people again for two days. So, yeah, give it time. And when you do movements that affect the nervous system, maybe we need to give it the full two days even before we do a different part of our own practice without going anywhere. That's the biggest single thing, is to really allow ourselves time and give ourselves the credit for who we are in our healing team.

Denise: Yeah, Yeah. I think that's the big takeaway is that we have to be our own master, you know, our own expert and trust ourselves.

Lulu: Yeah.

Denise: Great. Thank you so much. We're going to have to do some more later when we can expand on some of this, right?

Lulu: Sure, sure. Well, it's an honor to have been invited because you're giving a great service.

Denise: Thank you so much.

Lulu: You're welcome. Take care. God bless you.

Denise: Okay, bye. Bye.

If you'd like to contact Lulu, call her at 808-276-7005 or you can email her at luease12@icloud.com, luease12@icloud.com.  If you email her, send a text to let her know that she has an email to read.

We plan to do a follow-up episode where we discuss the difference between Hanna Somatics, Somatic Yoga and Traditional Yoga.

So, keep your eye out for that and thanks again for listening.