Feel it to Heal it

Therapeutically feeling the pain and  emotions that are trapped in our connective tissue or fascia is actually the way to heal them. 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. Find out more at bodyfirstmfr.com

Transcript

Welcome to MFR: 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.

Because most people don’t understand the role of fascia in causing pain and symptoms they don’t realize the role of fascia in healing. 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. 

Healing takes courage. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase: courage doesn’t mean not being afraid, it means feeling the fear and doing it anyway. This is so true when it comes to authentic healing with MFR because we’re going back to clean up the unfinished business from your past that’s causing your current pain and symptoms. And at times going back and remembering your painful past moments will be extremely difficult, uncomfortable and scary. But without cleaning up the past, those old wounds will continue to cause you pain and symptoms and push you into fight or flight even though the trauma is long over.

I was led to my career in helping others heal by a major injury. I like to say I didn’t choose this job, I was drafted for it. I found myself walking a path in this life that I never would have chosen because it was extremely painful and difficult for a long time but I can’t imagine my life without the things that I have learned along the path of healing. And I can’t imagine another way I could have learned the things I’ve learned. I don’t know if anyone takes the easy way. I mean, if I’d never been injured I never would have had the catalyst into growth and healing and knowing myself as I do now. Nothing can take that away, it’s mine, I know who I am and I know how to heal. 

One of the most useful lessons I’ve learned is that to get out of pain and symptoms you have to go into the pain and symptoms. Therapeutically feeling the pain and feeling the emotions is actually the way to heal them. You don’t have to run from them with pain killers or antidepressants or alcohol or food or overworking anymore, there is another way, in my experience a much better way, a healthier way to heal. It’s called Myofascial Release and it is a whole new way to look at healing. 

Instead of just managing symptoms, managing pain, managing our emotions, MFR gives us a healthy way to deal with these issues. Understanding the role fascia plays in pain, physical dysfunction, anxiety, depression, ptsd and so much of our daily experience in our body and in our mind will change your whole world. The best part is it gives you a way to actually heal much of what was once thought to be completely unchangeable once it had begun within us. But it turns out there is so much more to us than what we learned in school. We should have learned about how to take care of our bodies and our minds but we really didn’t. 

We enter this life in this incredibly complex body/mind system with no owner’s manual and we’re never really taught how to take care of ourselves. We just wait for problems to arise and attempt to manage them once they do. The reason for this is that most people don’t know how to maintain their bodies and minds properly. Certainly modern medicine has learned many things and can pull off some incredible healing feats, but as far as chronic pain, physical rehabilitation, ptsd, depression, anxiety, arthritis, migraines, fibromyalgia and many other conditions are concerned we have to look elsewhere for true healing. 

Myofascial release is a whole new way to approach healing. If you’re not familiar with fascia yet, it is our connective tissue and it plays a large role in the function of our bodies, our emotions and in our health. Until recently the importance of fascia was really quite overlooked but it has a hand in everything that goes on inside us. It covers and surrounds every part of us on a large and small scale. So it surrounds and goes all through every muscle, bone and organ in our body. Then it surrounds all the cells in your body and there is even a fascial structure inside every single cell. Fascia plays a large role in the alignment of your spine and hips and in how your joints function. It adds structure and support to your entire body and fascia is your shock absorption system. There is nothing within you that is outside the scope of your fascia. Even your emotions and the function of your nervous system are controlled by your fascia. 

This  is why ignoring your fascia would be unwise as far as your health is concerned and yet that is what has been accidentally happening in health care. I think the real reason for this oversight is because fascia doesn’t show up in MRI’s, CAT scans or x-rays and without being able to image it, it has been overlooked. However in the last decade research on fascia has really accelerated and the understanding of the importance of fascia in healing is much more widespread. Myofascial release (or MFR) has become a much more well known healing modality. 

Over the course of our lives we will experience many small and large injuries and traumas and they cause the fascia to become restricted which can cause all manner of pain, symptoms, physical dysfunction, anxiety and other physical & emotional issues. Fascial restrictions are areas where the connective tissue has tightened, hardened and become immobile. These restrictions can cause symptoms like chronic pain, headaches, vertigo, migraines, arthritis, joint pain and issues, back pain, tmj, immobility, nerve pain, anxiety and depression just to name a few. Issues like ptsd lay in the fascial system as well because of tissue memory which is when the physical or emotional pain of an injury, trauma or abuse gets tucked into the fascia and controls us from within, without us even knowing it. This can leave us living in chronic physical pain and dysfunction, fear or anxiety with our tissue memory silently pushing our physiology into fight or flight even after the initial injury or trauma is long over.

Every single one of us has fascial restrictions and tissue memory within us affecting how we feel physically, emotionally, how we move, our breath rate, heart rate and so much more.

When we experience an injury or trauma and we’re right in the middle of it, what typically happens is we disassociate when we hit a certain amount of overwhelm. This is why it is so common to not be able to remember all of the experience of a major injury or traumatic experience. There are usually gaps in what we remember from those situations. The moments we can’t remember are moments of disassociation and what is actually happening in those moments is that we are no longer processing what is happening to us.

Once we hit that point of overwhelm the pain and trauma are going straight to the archive that exists within us in the form of tissue memory. Even though we may not realize it, those archived painful and traumatic moments waiting in our fascia are ruling us. They can be causing the pain we are experiencing years and even many decades later. They can cause ptsd symptoms, flashbacks, anxiety or they can keep us from living fully because without us realizing it consciously, our body begins to divert us from things that remind us of that injury or trauma. And our world gets smaller. Life has all sorts of experiences like this so our world gets smaller again. This can happen over and over tangling up our tissue memory of archived painful moments within us until our world is so small we feel choked and squeezed from inside and we can’t run fast enough to get away from our painful past.

Only one thing I’ve found after 20 years of hard searching has made any progress at truly healing the long term pain after major injury, the physical pain and symptoms, the ptsd, the flashbacks, all of it...and that is really high quality Barnes style Myofascial Release. Going back with the intention to feel and now heal these broken moments from the past puts the pieces back together. Working to remember the moments that went straight to the tissue memory archive allows us to realize that beliefs, fears and misperceptions got lodged within those tissue memories and have been silently running the show inside our bodies since the moment the trauma first occurred. That is because the tissue memory archive lives in the subconscious and the subconscious rules, it always wins over your conscious choices. That is why in order to heal you have to learn to get in touch with your subconscious, to find those frozen moments from your past and those stifling beliefs and lies that have been ruling you. Then you can see if you are ready to change those beliefs to something healthy now that suits you and who you really are, and stop carrying around someone else’s old damaging lies, or your own misperceptions of your past. 

To learn to interact with your subconscious, to learn who you really are, to find the lessons in the pain of the past and come out stronger on the other side of climbing the healing mountain. This is what authentic healing is really about. It’s not just releasing your fascia, it’s not just getting you moving well again though those are very important pieces. True healing is a transformation that most likely never would have occurred had you never gone through the painful or traumatic situation you survived. But if you can let it be a lesson and a guide to help you live true to yourself and learn about who you are and who you want to be, what you want to accomplish in this life, then maybe your worst day could transform into your best. And a tragedy can become a catalyst for change that leads you to a whole new life.

You needn't feel powerless in your healing process or a victim of your past, you can turn that all around now. You can stop fighting what happened to you and instead use that energy to heal yourself, reconnect with your instincts and get to know the true you behind the programming you received in childhood, behind the misperceptions you may have about yourself, behind all the b.s.. Once you’ve connected to that inner part of yourself and learned how to heal you’ll have these skills forever, to take great care of yourself and to pass along to your friends and loved ones. 

Great MFR treatment and training changes your perception of the world, if you let it. It gives you the skills and power to take care of your body and your emotions, to see things more clearly, to help you heal your relationships and interact in a healthier way with everyone you encounter. Not everyone will embrace all aspects of MFR available to them and that is completely OK. Some people come to some of the deeper interior healing eventually and some don’t. But everyone should know all the aspects of authentic healing high quality MFR has to offer whether they choose to explore all the possibilities of healing or not. 

There are also many different modalities called myofascial release, the only one that I recommend is Barnes Myofascial Release. And even within Barnes Myofascial Release there are as many different takes on what MFR is as there are therapists practicing it. If you are unimpressed by your first appointment, try another therapist, it should wow you if it is done correctly by telehealth treatments or in person appointments. But like any other profession there are incredible therapists and not so incredible therapists out there so you may have to shop a bit but your healing is certainly worth the effort.

I recommend reading some bio’s and finding a therapist who has healed something big in themselves. I can tell you from personal experience that this has given me a unique perspective, being a therapist and having healed something extremely challenging within myself. It gave me skills that can’t be learned any other way. Even working with clients remotely via video chat I can feel and see things in them that others do not. That is part of the gifts from my healing experiences, healing your painful experiences will give you many gifts as well. As you work with a well seasoned MFR therapist, like myself, as your guide you will begin to leave your pain behind and realize the gifts those injuries and traumas have brought out in you. Life is a painful journey at times but when we have a good MFR therapist helping us heal we can start to let go of the pain and feel and focus on the beauty again. It is still there waiting for us even in the darkest times, we just need to learn to find the light within us once again. 

I offer my clients authentic MFR healing. I combine the best of all my many years of MFR experience into a powerful healing program tailored to each client’s specific needs. If you have not experienced MFR treatment before you should know that there is this incredibly powerful form of healing out there waiting for you. And when you open yourself to the journey of healing with me as your guide you will find a whole new world of expansive possibilities opens up to you. With a fresh new perspective on your life and the skills of a new method of healing to take great care of your body and your mind, you can move freely into living fully and enjoying your life again.

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!