Welcome to Myofascial Release: A New Perspective on Healing

In this episode we'll explore the role of Myofascial Release in the healing of physical injuries and emotional traumas. We'll take a new perspective on healing the body and the mind by looking at the role fascia (or connective tissue) plays in getting well. For more info visit bodyfirstmfr.com

Transcript

Welcome to Myofascial Release: A New Perspective on Healing

This podcast is all about physical and emotional healing with myofascial release.  My name is Liana, I’m an expert level MFR therapist. I specialize in pain relief and all things related to authentic healing of physical and emotional injuries and trauma. I help clients from all over the country and abroad via private Telehealth MFR treatments. You can find out more about working with me and healing with myofascial release at bodyfirstmfr.com. 

Myofascial Release (mfr) is a method of healing the body and the emotions by addressing your fascia. The fascia is typically completely ignored in medicine and that means that true healing is missed. Much of what is done and prescribed for physical or emotional pain is symptom management. But instead of just managing symptoms, what if we worked on authentically healing the issue that caused the pain, symptoms or problems in the first place. That’s where myofascial release comes in.

Fascia is the connective tissue that surrounds and goes all thru every part of your body under your skin. It has a fractal-like configuration meaning it has layers that get smaller and smaller. So it covers your whole body right under your skin, then it covers every muscle, bone and organ in your body, then it covers every muscle fiber in your body and every cell. Then there is an intra cellular fascial structure which means there’s even fascia inside your cells. And that is why by treating and tending to the fascia we can make profound healing changes in the body. With results like healing chronic pain and symptoms, healing physical and emotional trauma, ptsd and other emotional issues and so much more.

Treating the fascia allows us to help you heal your symptoms by working on the real cause of the issue in the first place as opposed to just managing those symptoms. Like if someone is having joint pain, for example, instead of just putting a brace on a painful knee or taking pain killers, mfr seeks out why the knee is hurting in the first place. Often it may have to do with the muscles and fascia above and below the joint needing to be released or the hips being tight, misaligned or twisted and needing to be balanced. Or it may have to do with a specific injury or trauma from your past. A well trained MFR therapist will help you decipher and work through the cause of your ailment or pain. Even if long term knee pain led someone to have surgery for example. After the surgical intervention is complete the issue that caused the pain in the first place like fascial restrictions above and below the knee or hip misalignment, etc., those issues still have not been dealt with. MFR can help with these root cause fascial restrictions and help you make a full recovery.

One of the greatest attributes of MFR is that it gives you something you can do to actually help relieve your pain and work on your healing yourself anytime you feel the need. Not just numb yourself with drugs or make you always rely on someone else to relieve your pain for you. A good and experienced MFR therapist will teach you a wide variety of MFR self-therapy techniques and that is such an important and necessary part of your healing process. It gives you the skills to release your fascial restrictions yourself to relieve pain, increase body awareness and get in touch with your emotions, if you’re open to that. When your fascia or connective tissue gets tight and stuck and hardens that’s called a fascial restriction and these restrictions cause much of our pain and physical symptoms. They can form when we experience injuries, surgeries, trauma or from sports, physical jobs or repetitive stress and they can leave us with lingering physical pain years or even decades later. But interestingly enough many of our emotional issues live in our fascial restrictions as well. So releasing these areas of stuck and tightened fascia can relieve both our physical pain and symptoms as well as our emotional issues like anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, etc.

That's why MFR is such an amazing and unique method of deep healing. It gives us a way to heal our physical pains and symptoms and to work through and heal our emotional issues too. Healing your fascia with myofascial release is so powerful that all within one incredible healing modality, you can find both physical and emotional healing. I don’t believe any other modality can offer such thorough healing for those willing to take the journey.

And to be clear the only way to release the fascia is with long held, sustained pressure applied with conscious awareness and the complete focus of the practitioner (whether that is you doing self therapy or your MFR therapist releasing restrictions for you). Only Barnes myofascial release offers that combo to actually release fascial restrictions that will remain completely un-changed with other modalities. So no fascial releasing will occur from deep tissue massage, rolfing, shiatsu, reiki, fascia blasters, hot stone massage, muscle relaxers or other “what I call ‘old school’” forms of myofascial release done without consciousness or sustained pressure - none of these can actually release fascial restrictions. Only a therapist specializing in Barnes myofascial release can help you learn to actually make lasting changes and releases in your fascial system.

Another reason fascial healing is so special and offers such unparalleled benefits is because it helps us work through something called tissue memory. Which is our body’s cellular memory. In it our bodies store thoughts, memories, belief, misperceptions, and more, in our connective tissue. So inside our fascial restrictions our body has imprinted all sorts of information about what was going on inside your mind and body, in your emotions and out in the world around you when that fascial restriction was formed. That means that our tissue memory can be ruling us from within, without us even knowing it. This causes us to have physical habits, emotions and beliefs about ourselves and the world that can cause us to make poor decisions without even realizing that our fascia is calling the shots. It can even keep us living in chronic pain if we leave our fascial restrictions and tissue memory undealt with - and unchecked these restrictions can cause serious trouble over time.

That’s because these restrictions in the fascia don’t stay stagnant but instead they tend to get tighter and tighter over time, gluing down your tissues and solidifying and sort of growing like scar tissue does. When you have a restricted area that doesn’t move well or function properly your body will have to compensate and get another area to overwork to make up for that restriction. Over time that overworking area will become overused and restricted and another area will take over for it and on and on we go tightening down more and more of your body and making a real mess of things, causing all sorts of pain and symptoms along the way. These fascial restrictions can also tangle up with each other and with scar tissue which can really lock you down and cause terrible pain or all manner of symptoms.

So you can see why it is so important to take care of your fascia and as I’ve said the only modality that can teach you how to do this is myofascial release. What you’ll find is that MFR becomes a way of life and caring for your fascia can be something you do regularly like brushing your teeth or taking a shower. That is the best way to get on top of old issues causing you pain and symptoms and prevent that tangle of restrictions and scar tissue that could or may already be causing you so much pain and trouble.

The only way to get through to your fascia is with sustained pressure. You can’t release your fascial restrictions with massage or exercise, heat, muscle relaxers or by rolling with a foam roller or a tennis ball. Long held pressure with focused awareness, lets you sink all the way down to the depths of the fascia and make long lasting healing changes in the body like nothing else can. As you are just starting out healing with MFR you’ll need to repeat fascial releases over and over for a while. And we all have a constellation of our own unique restrictions, scar tissue and tissue memory within us to work through. MFR self-therapy will give you the skills to release your own fascial restrictions with this long sustained pressure so that you can truly relieve your pain anytime you need to and repeat as needed. 

Another very interesting thing about fascia is that it connects all over your body. What you’ll find is that when you engage all the way down to the fascia you’ll often feel a connection somewhere else in your body if you pay attention. This is how your body will guide you down the yellow brick road of healing. Sometimes a pain in one place is actually caused by a fascial restriction in a completely different part of your body. So at times you can just do self-therapy or get treated where your pain is and that will work. But many times you have to find the cause of the pain that is actually rooted somewhere else in your body. It’s like a treasure hunt and the map to find the cause of the pain is these connections and sensations you feel during treatment or self-therapy. 

That is why you want to work with a very experienced MFR therapist who can guide you and help you learn to listen to your body and understand the messages it gives you. This takes many years to develop these skills but for a well trained therapist like myself, I can see fascial connections just by looking at you or hear the connections in my clients description of their pain. I teach my clients to be able to feel the path of their healing and to learn to interpret the sensations they feel, so they can feel their way through to releasing their pain and relieving their symptoms.

*Now releasing the fascia is just the first half of healing. After you learn to release your restrictions then we have to get the area moving and functioning properly again otherwise your pain and symptoms will typically return. I’ve created 2 programs to help my client’s make the best recovery possible called fascial exercise and MFR rehab. Like I mentioned before, while you are injured or while your fascia is restricted, while you are having or avoiding symptoms your body will do something called compensating. Compensating is when your body figures out how to use another area to do the job of the troubled area while it can’t function properly. Over time, and this doesn’t take very long, the compensation becomes a habit and replaces the body’s old correct way of doing things with this compensation. 

The problem is after we release the fascial restrictions our body doesn’t just magically go back to using the muscles properly again, instead it keeps using the compensation which is now a habit and the new normal. The trouble with this is eventually it will cause new pains and injuries because you have an area doing its own job and someone else's job that it is not made to do forever, it was just meant to help out for a little while as you were healing. So while compensations are super helpful in the short term, they can be extremely detrimental in the long term. Even if you workout or you go to physical therapy, you’ll go and do all the exercises with the wrong muscles, compensating and not even realize you are doing it, and that can make your symptoms much worse. This happens all the time.

So first we have to release your fascial restrictions otherwise you won’t be able to use certain muscles and areas of your body if they are restricted. Then we have to use my fascial exercise and MFR rehab programs to return these formerly restricted areas to proper use to fully relieve you of pain and symptoms and keep them from returning for good. Then you’ll have the skills to take care of yourself should your pain or symptoms ever start to come back, like if you start a new workout, have a new injury or flare up your old symptoms somehow. The skills of learning to listen to your body and respond appropriately, to know how to take good care of your fascia and your whole self, these are life skills and they are game changing.

One of the biggest things we have to learn is that pain is not the enemy. Pain is a messenger. When your body is hurting it is asking for your help, and telling you exactly what it needs if you know how to listen. If instead of listening tho, we numb ourselves with painkillers, drugs, alcohol, food, over-working or over committing, we’re working against ourselves and that never goes well. You can never run fast enough to get away from your pain or your feelings, anywhere you run, there they are. It can be hard to stop and face your physical or emotional issues but when you do and you feel what you’ve been running from with a well trained MFR therapist as your guide, you’ll be amazed at what you can do, what you can heal and how life changing it can be.

You don’t have to fear your pain or run from your symptoms anymore, there is a way out, it’s called myofascial release. Now most myofascial release therapists can offer you the fascial release part of the process but that is only half of your healing. The fascial exercise and mfr rehab are my own programs that you won’t find anywhere else. I created them to complete my own healing and to be able to offer my clients more thorough and long lasting healing results. After 15 years of helping client’s heal with myofascial release, as well as working through my own healing after a few major injuries, I know what it takes to make a full recovery. 

Fascia is either a powerful friend or a formidable opponent depending on how you treat it. Get to know yours with Myofascial Release and you will have a true friend in your fascia that can guide your physical healing, emotional healing and personal growth for the rest of your life. 

To work with me on your healing visit me at bodyfirstmfr.com. Empower yourself with the skills to heal and care for your body right and free yourself from relying on anyone else to heal you.

Thank you for joining me today my friends and as always, happy healing!