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.
Learning to follow your instincts is the absolute best thing you can do for your healing and for simply living your best life. Your instincts have wisdom beyond your thinking mind, millions of years of evolution and experience passed down through your DNA that now has a chance to live in you. But you can only access this ancient wisdom if you can get out of your head and truly connect to your body.
One of the most common things I hear from people when we are going over how an injury happened or how a symptom flare up was caused is something like ‘I knew I shouldn’t do it but I did it anyway’. ‘I knew it was too much, too heavy, too far’. ‘I knew I should have stopped but I didn’t listen’. We start practicing shutting down our instincts pretty early in life, it is a big part of our socialization that I think is really troubling. Because by the time we are adults we often can’t feel our instincts anymore and even if we do, we’re so used to overriding them and shutting them down that we don’t listen to them anyway.
This can have catastrophic consequences in our lives because we are no longer listening to any of our inner wisdom, our gut feelings and feelings we know deep down we ought to honor. Instead we are following what we think we “should” do, what we think others would want us to do, what we feel like we have to do even if it goes against our instincts about what is right for us.
When it comes to healing, your instincts and inner wisdom must be the guiding force. It is the job of your MFR therapist to help you access and reconnect to your instincts in order to help you heal. That is a big part of why MFR healing can have such long lasting results that other modalities can’t reach. Any healing done only from the thinking mind will only have short lived results. This is because the instincts connect us to a whole different plane of existence, a different level of reality and a much deeper truth than the thinking mind can access.
For healing we need these deeper truths and this expanded level of awareness that comes when we are connected to our instincts. Then we have access to the deep levels of healing. When the therapist is listening to their instincts and the client is in tune with their own inner wisdom, that is when quantum healing shifts can occur. And often in this situation I’ll pose a question to my client that has come from my instincts and they’ll say “Oh, I was just thinking the exact same thing”. It is as though we have just tuned to the same radio station and we’ve synced up with each other. I find that seems to put people even more at ease and allows them to admit things to themselves that perhaps they haven’t before or trust enough to allow themselves to feel emotions or sensations that they have not yet felt fully. This can often lead to profound healing.
We tend to think that all healing of physical issues needs a physical fix, and sometimes it really does. But other times the physical fix will come from the psyche, from the emotions and from shifts in perspective. Which is why we must explore how we feel about what is happening to us and about the pain and symptoms that we are having. It is not enough just physically “fix” the pain, if that‘s all we fix, the pain and symptoms will typically return. We have to connect to the problem and listen for our instincts as to what we need to heal the deep seated roots of the issue. That way we can get to the depth of a lasting solution.
Everything happens for a reason, injuries, accidents and so on. If we can muster the courage to explore the underlying reasons why these things have happened to us we can use these life experiences to fuel both our healing and our personal growth. Then nothing is a waste, if we are learning and evolving and getting to know the truth of who we are, exploring why we are here and what we hope to accomplish with this life.
Your instincts are a deeper part of you than most people tap into on a daily basis these days. There was a time when all humans lived much more by their instincts than we do today. I think it would behove us all to find a balance between listening to the guidance of our minds and tapping into the wisdom of our instincts. As the world becomes more about thinking we must remember the importance of feeling. As humanity disconnects from nature we must seek out that connection to keep our sanity and keep ourselves grounded. We must learn to hear the small voice that whispers in our inner ear when it guides us. It is far too easy to discount or discredit that small voice or that gut feeling but you will often regret that decision.
It takes practice and experienced guidance to learn to hear and listen to the inner voice of your instincts after a lifetime ignoring it. But if your goal is to heal a physical pain or symptom, to heal an emotional issue or to grow and evolve as a person then the task of learning to hear and honor your instincts is extremely valuable. And you must dare to act on those gut feelings and the advice of that soft inner voice when it whispers in your ear.
The best part is that listening to your instincts is a skill that will serve you well in all aspects of your life. From driving down the road and getting an instinct like “I need to move away from this car next to me, even if it means going out of my way”, to thinking “Whoa, I need to take tiny little penguin steps on this ice”, to making all sorts of daily life decisions big and small. Or when we are questioning “what should I do?” about something, if we connect to our body and listen for our inner guidance we will know what to do.
The trouble comes when our inner guidance says one thing and our thinking mind says something else. Then we feel like we have a dilemma. I have found over the years that no matter how inconvenient it is or how I may have to displease others - following my instincts must be my first choice. For years I watched myself try to choose against my instincts for many seemingly good reasons and this choice was inevitably a mistake every time.
The only way to really live true to ourselves is to follow our instincts and you don’t have to shun technology or give up your house and live in a cave somewhere to do it. It can meld seamlessly with your day, you just have to first learn to hear or feel your instincts again. Then, and this takes some time and practice, you have to care about what your instincts tell you and care enough about yourself to let these precious instincts of yours be the loudest voice in your head.
When you first learn to hear your instincts again they will be the smallest feeling or the faintest whisper and they’ll be very easy to ignore accidentally or on purpose. But every time you feel your instincts and decide to go against them and you see what that gets you and then you think “I wish I had listened to my instincts” you’ll get a little closer. Life will absolutely bring you another chance and if you care to put some energy into it you will get there. You can allow yourself to follow your instincts and even though you may inadvertently piss someone else off in doing so, you’ll have a deep sense of calm internally knowing you did what was right for you.
The reason following your instincts can lead to inadvertently pissing someone else off is that instead of listening to their instincts many people do something called ‘people pleasing’. That is when we go places we don’t really want to go, do things we don’t really want to do, etcetera to please others instead of doing what feels right to us. When we’ve been lifelong people pleasers and then we decide to live more true to ourselves and be more honest with the people in our lives, stand up for ourselves, take our power back and so on, it can be a bit of a tough transition to say the least. But this is a big part of healing and following your instincts. Authentic healing cannot be achieved while people pleasing.
If someone always feels bad about themself and allows themself to get really stepped on in all their relationships there will eventually be a symptom that goes along with this pattern. That’s just how our bodies and minds work, they are intimately connected and our fascia plays a part in our interactions. For example, many people who don’t use their voice to speak up for themselves have jaw issues, throat and neck tightness - like their using fascial restrictions in their jaw, throat and neck to shut themselves up and keep themselves from speaking the truth. This is not always the case but it is a fairly common pattern.
Fascial restrictions can work that way. Which is why your fascia holds so much emotion, so many deep truths and the memories of so many old hurts. Fascia is a memory bank within you of many things that your mind may not even be aware of. Tissue or cellular memory goes back before you can possibly remember. It is that inner part of us that is recording everything that happens to us even when we are asleep, in shock, knocked out or under anesthesia. Or from when we were born or when we were tiny little babies.
There is so much wisdom and information stored within our bodies it is an unfathomable amount. If all we ever use to live or heal ourselves is our thinking mind, no matter how smart we are we will miss out on so much. We can do and be so much more than we think if we can access those higher states of awareness by connecting to our bodies and feeling our instincts. We can save ourselves so much trouble asking inward for answers instead of asking others who can’t possibly know what is right for us as smart and well meaning as they may be. Wisdom comes from within and we all have it. We all have DNA that has evolved over millennia and that ancient wisdom resounds inside us all. We have only to learn to tune ourselves in to hear the wisdom within.
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!