Ep. 102: What's the Deal With Lymphatic Drainage? Dreena Burton Explains

Curious to know what lymphatic drainage is, what it does, and how to do it? Tune in. 

In this mini-episode, Dreena Burton joins Lauren Bernick to explain the connection between fascia 
health, lymphatic flow, and overall wellness. Drawing from both fascia science and Chinese medicine, Dreena shares simple practices that may help support detoxification, reduce stiffness, and improve how your body feels day to day.

They discuss dry brushing, diaphragmatic breathing, liver flow, and why movement matters for keeping your lymphatic system functioning well. 

Dreena demonstrates a fascia exercise for your liver that helps with pain on the outside of your leg and knee. She then goes through how to do a lymphatic drain, using your fingers. 

Topics include: fascia health, lymphatic drainage, pain reduction, dry brushing, deep breathing, liver support, and Chinese medicine.

Topics include: fascia health, lymphatic drainage, pain reduction, dry brushing, deep breathing, liver support, and Chinese medicine.

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Transcript

Lauren Bernick (00:02.189)
Hi friends, stay tuned for a mini episode with Dreena Burton, who is going to talk to us about how fascia health improves lymphatic drainage and reduces pain. This episode is sponsored by Grand Teton Ancient Grains. They're a small organic family farm and mill located in Idaho, focused on bringing back nature's ancient grains. They grow everything in healthy soil without pesticides, herbicides or glyphosate.

Did you know that most of your grains are sprayed with glyphosate to dry them out? That never happens on their farm. Whether you're looking for grains, flour, or bronze cut pasta, they've got you covered. Upgrade your pantry with thoughtfully grown food at ancientgrains.com, free shipping when you fill a box. You can find that information in the show notes. My guest today is Dreena Burton. likely, you probably own one of her fabulous whole food.

plant-based cookbooks, or you've taken one of her incredible Fascia Flow classes, you can find her at drinaburton.com or appapp.fasciaflow, that's Flow with F-L-O, no W, .com. That'll also be in the show notes. Welcome Drina Burton, hello. Hi. my pleasure. So last time you were on for a mini episode,

Dreena Burton (01:17.442)
Hello, Lauren. Thank you for having me back.

Lauren Bernick (01:26.997)
If anybody wants to go back and listen, it's episode 98. We talked a lot about what is fascia, what is going on right now for spring in Chinese medicine, liver and gallbladder, right? Yep, and so if anybody wants to go and listen to that, they can get more information. But today, we're gonna focus a little bit more on.

Dreena Burton (01:39.342)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Go Blonder, that's right, you've got it, yep.

Lauren Bernick (01:53.219)
Something that people are talking a lot about, lymphatic drainage, and then we'll also do a little flow for our liver, right? Is that what we're gonna do? Should we do the liver flow first?

Dreena Burton (02:01.088)
Yeah, sounds good.

Dreena Burton (02:05.974)
I think we'll do the liver flow first and then we'll do the lymphatic.

drainage because when we do work with the fascia and we're kind of clearing it out, the density that is, it has to move through the lymphatic system. It has to be excreted through the body, any of the debris so to speak. But anytime we're, it's like a metabolic process that we need to move out of the body. So doing a little lymphatic drainage afterwards is always helpful. And of course our fascia is essential.

to our lymphatic health and lymphatic drainage is the hot topic right now. Lymphatic health is really a big topic and I don't think a lot of people know that our lymph is housed in our fascia. So in order for the lymph to move, the fascia does need to be healthy. If we're doing these lymphatic drainage processes, it's helpful, it's good, we want to do them. But if we have a lot of blockages in the fascia, it's kind of like a kink in the

Lauren Bernick (02:53.708)
Of course.

Dreena Burton (03:09.422)
garden hose. It's the the fluid's not moving as well because there's literally some adhesion, some scar tissue, some some restrictions and then it's like it's tightening up the channels of the flow for the lymph to move through.

Lauren Bernick (03:26.037)
And can you just explain a little bit about our lymph system? Do you know much about it? And also like dry brushing, people are doing that, right? Actually, I have a dry brush and I've been doing it. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Dreena Burton (03:44.366)
Yeah, yeah, I feel like dry brushing has come back. was a time we were doing it in the, I don't know, 90s or early 2000s something, and now people are doing it. And it's, you know, it's helping really invigorate the skin and our skin health is related to our lungs, actually. Our lungs connect to our functioning in our skin. The pores have to open to release and close. So when we're dry brushing, we're helping to open the skin's movement to exchange.

Lauren Bernick (03:47.349)
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

Dreena Burton (04:14.319)
But lymphatic drainage is a little bit different. We go through a sequence to move the lymph in the body and the lymph is kind of like our waste collection, right? It's picking up the things in our body that need to move out and it's like a little hub of, I like to think of it almost as like little garbage trucks going through our body. And we have lymph nodes in clusters in the body. So we have lymph nodes that are in very specific clusters, many areas of the body.

Lauren Bernick (04:35.245)
Haha.

Dreena Burton (04:44.269)
We know we have many in the armpit and for women it's always important, you know, we here to not wear a bra all day just so that we're not restricting all of these lymph nodes in the armpit area. But we also have lymph nodes in our throat. Of course, we go to the doctor. It's the first area they'll check to see if our lymph nodes are swollen. We have them in our elbows, behind our knees and the hip crease and in the gut. We have them in the gut and that's really important as well.

Lauren Bernick (05:10.147)
I did not know that. How do you get to those when you do like if when you're I know you could reach the other ones like just by touching on them how do you reach the ones in your gut?

Dreena Burton (05:13.631)
Yeah.

Dreena Burton (05:19.627)
Yeah, there is a way we do it and it's through, we have a little movement that we'll do for this area called the cisterna ciali, but also deep breath.

diaphragmatic breathing will activate those lymph nodes. And then what we want to do is we first always sweep around the collarbone. We'll do this after our flow, but this is the where all of the lymph dumps. It's into this collarbone area here. And so the first thing we do before any lymphatic drainage and even if you're dry brushing is to lightly sweep here and you can do this any time of the day because if this is clogged, if it's not open,

then you're collecting the lymph from other areas of the body but it can't go into the main hub to then go be directed back into the bloodstream to be moved out through the system. So we always want to clear this here in the collarbone.

Lauren Bernick (06:15.757)
You know, I do, I've had Famiko Takatsu on the Face Yoga Lady and she was a guest, but also that's how she starts every one of hers is by tapping on your lymph in your collarbone. And then yeah, we do a sweep. So that's interesting. Very, yeah, she is. She, there's a lot of Face Yoga people. She, she like,

Dreena Burton (06:23.265)
yes!

Dreena Burton (06:30.382)
Yeah, yeah, that she was the OG yoga person, I believe.

Lauren Bernick (06:42.945)
you know, teaches them and I think certifies them. So hopefully they're all through her. don't know, but she is the OG face yoga lady, but okay. And so.

Dreena Burton (06:47.626)
Mm-hmm. is, So yeah, anything like that, you want to start here because then you can think of it as a traffic jam, right? If you have cars ahead of you, you can't just push them away. The cars in the front have to clear. You want to push them away, but you need to clear.

Lauren Bernick (07:03.926)
Yeah.

Okay, that's a good way of thinking about it. Okay, so last time we talked about this is spring, the organs associated with spring are the liver and gallbladder. And so do you want to do the liver first show us you guys also you can watch this on YouTube. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple, you could head over to age like about us mother on YouTube and watch this. But otherwise, we're going to describe it so you can also listen.

Dreena Burton (07:18.082)
Yeah.

Dreena Burton (07:30.765)
Yeah.

We'll describe it. And can I mention first what some of the pain areas that it's good for to work with liver? Yeah. So when we're working with the liver and gallbladder, we're really helping to because pain in the body, when we feel pain, we think the pain is where we feel it, but it's not the source of the pain. That is actually just the victim. So the culprit is somewhere else. So we speak of the culprit and the victim. The victim is where you're feeling it. So when we're feeling pain in an area and we want to go after it and

Lauren Bernick (07:38.697)
Yes, please.

Dreena Burton (08:03.61)
kind of massage and dig into it. That's not where it's coming from. So if we have pain in the low back area, it's actually coming from restrictions because of things that are going on in the hamstrings and the IT band and the inner thighs that change the pelvis. They change the tilt of the pelvis or the compression. And then this creates pain in the low back. So if we work with the liver flow, it's going to help and the gallbladder with the low back. And then if we have pain on the outside of the legs or outside

of the knees, this will also be really good for pain in the very outside, like straight down the outside of the knees and legs. Liver will help with that. And then because it's related to things like seasonal allergies and headaches, also a nice one to do for that too. I'll just... Yeah, it's you know, our bodies are so intelligent and they're simple and they're complex at the same time, right? You know, there's ways we can address things.

Lauren Bernick (08:52.163)
That's so crazy.

Dreena Burton (09:03.53)
that are kind of mind-blowing because it seems too simple but it's because there's such intelligence in the body that it knows what to do we just have to facilitate it a little bit. So I'm going to come to standing.

Dreena Burton (09:26.862)
Okay, so from a standing position, you're just going to widen your feet and bring your feet wider than your shoulders and then point your toes out slightly. engagement, whenever we're working with fascia moves, we want to create engagement. It's engagement and then with expansion or lengthening that changes the fascia. And this is hard for us because all we've ever done in movement is either strength train or lengthen in stretching. So you want to think of when you're

going to lengthen, you engage first. So to engage here, my feet are wide, toes pointed out. I'm going to try to squeeze through the balls of my feet. So it's as if both feet want to, the legs want to come together at center, but they're not. But my feet are squeezing together at the balls of the feet. And then from here, I'm just going to turn to the side. I slightly roll my tailbone under while squeezing the balls of the feet. I'm just going to bend forward.

and then I release all that tension and then come back up. Squeeze the balls of the feet, roll tailbone under slightly, squeeze, and you're gonna feel the inner thighs, the abductors, engage. And that's what you want. You wanna feel those nice and engaged, like you're trying to strength train, and then you lengthen by bending forward. And you let it go, and you come up.

Lauren Bernick (10:48.139)
And you stop when you start feeling the, you stop when you feel what?

Dreena Burton (10:54.123)
you come to a range where you start to feel like you don't have engagement anymore. It's a really good question Lauren, because we're used to lengthening, lengthening and going past our point of the muscle saying, stop. And we keep going. That creates micro tears. So we want to engage.

lengthen by bending forward and then we feel where that engagement starts to taper off. For me it's here, I'm not even past like 90 degrees here and I come up and I do that.

Lauren Bernick (11:26.027)
Okay, so again, her balls of her feet are pointing out. They're like more than hips width, they're pointing out and it's like she, the action is like, like she wants to drag the balls of them together, but she's not. It's just that feeling, that intention of like dragging them together and then bending forward. And here comes a dog to help.

Dreena Burton (11:37.003)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. This is Miss Cricket, our rescue dog from Mexico. She was a, she's a sweet, sweet baby and she was badly abused and we got her last summer from Mexico and she hangs out with me when I do fascia.

Lauren Bernick (11:50.537)
Hi Cricket!

Lauren Bernick (11:56.803)
Lauren Bernick (12:02.052)
She's helping. She's doing it.

Dreena Burton (12:02.669)
You're doing it right now. this is what animals do. They stretch their little paws forward, they tense, and then they move. You never see animals stretch and just hang out in an end range. They create this tension and lengthening. It's called pandiculation. So we can take that cue from animals because they do it 40 to 50 times a day.

Lauren Bernick (12:09.73)
Right.

Lauren Bernick (12:17.366)
right.

Lauren Bernick (12:28.088)
dang.

Dreena Burton (12:29.079)
And you'll see every time they get up for my rest, they'll do that. And they're doing that for their fascia, so they know. And we're just bringing it into different muscle groups. And that's it. So you can do this 10 to 20 times, then do another set midday 10 to 20 times. And you're gonna start to notice if you have pain in the outside of the knee, outside of the hips, that little by little, that starts to diminish.

Lauren Bernick (12:32.643)
They do that, yeah.

Lauren Bernick (12:56.003)
That's good. again, she was pointing her feet out as if she wanted to drag the balls of the feet together and then bending forward until she felt like she couldn't engage more. Squeezing, squeezing the inner thighs together or just squeezing the balls of the feet. Also squeezing.

Dreena Burton (13:07.149)
Squeezing first though, squeezing first.

Yep, both. When you squeeze the balls of the feet, that's creating the inner thigh squeezing. So when you squeeze your feet together through the balls of the feet, you're going to squeeze the inner thighs.

Lauren Bernick (13:17.867)
It engages. Okay. Okay.

Lauren Bernick (13:26.893)
Okay.

Dreena Burton (13:26.911)
And the reason I say balls of the feet, because if we squeeze through the back of the feet, we touch on a different muscle group. It's not wrong. It's just not in the liver, liver territory. We're not in liver land. And that's it. And then from here, we can do the lymphatic drainage. Okay. So I'll walk you through it. So we start with the sweeping at the collarbone.

Lauren Bernick (13:36.333)
Okay.

Okay, that's great. Okay, let's do it.

Dreena Burton (13:52.046)
And it's a light sweep. We're not trying to dig in. We're just, it's like a touch that feels pleasurable, right? We're just sweeping the skin. And this is the termini, it's called. So you can think of it as like the big terminal station where all the cars are coming and you need to clear this out first. And you do maybe 20 to 30 or you can tap, as you said.

and then we start to clear from the jawbone down to the termini. So everything comes back to the termini. So we're sweeping from, bring your fingers to the base of your jaw and sweep down the neck towards your collarbone. sustain.

Lauren Bernick (14:32.45)
But it should be pretty light, right? What's the pressure?

Dreena Burton (14:35.935)
It's light, you're not digging in. Yeah, yeah. It's actually counterproductive to dig in. So it's just light. So from base of jawbone down towards collarbone. And you do 20 to 30 sweeps. And you're going to notice as you're doing this, you may notice this yourself, Lauren, that you feel the inclination to swallow or clear your throat. It's a good sign. And then we come just under the collarbone. I'm going to come forward here for those on camera. And there's a little divot

under the collarbone. And you can find it by rolling your shoulders forward, and you're gonna find this little pocket right under the collarbone. And this is the apical area, and we're gonna sweep there up. So it's like sweeping in the divot, just up towards the termini, sweep, sweep. So I've crossed my hands at my collarbone, and I'm just under the collarbone as I'm sweeping. I do this every day. Yep.

Lauren Bernick (15:31.235)
towards the center.

Dreena Burton (15:33.538)
Yeah, and I do this every day. usually do it in the bath because I'm nice and relaxed and I just sit there. It's five minutes and it really helps your immunity, right? It's good for puffiness. If you get puffiness in the morning to do this, it's you're going to notice some changes in your body. Good. And then we move to the armpit zone where we have a lot. And here we need to do one at a time because when we try to do two, there's too much tension. So we just relax. I'm going to relax.

my right arm and I'm going to use my left hand to sweep up towards so again we're sweeping up towards the collarbone. Gotta get comfortable with your armpits here.

Lauren Bernick (16:15.203)
I'm comfortable with my armpit.

Dreena Burton (16:18.251)
Good, good. So this is the quicker version. There's another version where we can involve the elbows and wrists and ankles, but we'll just do the main ones today, sweeping up towards the termini, the collarbone. And then we'll switch it to the left arm. So we take the right hand under the left armpit and just sweep, sweep. I also sometimes go to the local sauna or pool and I do it in the sauna too.

don't care.

Lauren Bernick (16:47.591)
yeah. I do it. I do a workout in the sauna and I do, I bring, I bring your fascia. Well, I bring my phone in there and I do your fascia flow in there sometimes. huh. Work up a sweat. That's nice.

Dreena Burton (16:56.695)
Do you? Yeah. Yeah.

If anyone asks, you can help them learn something. That's good. Now we're coming to what's called the cisterna cili. This is in that area of the gut. Where it lands is between the belly button and the sternum. If we place one finger right at the base of our sternum, in the middle of our rib cage, and we find our belly button, that's the area we're sweeping from belly button up. We take both hands, sweep up.

Lauren Bernick (17:04.374)
Yeah.

Dreena Burton (17:29.583)
You don't have to dig in, but you can go a little bit deeper, but you don't dig in. It may feel more tender than say working the armpit.

Lauren Bernick (17:40.652)
wow, this is, I've never done this before. This is awesome.

Dreena Burton (17:41.58)
Yeah. Okay, well, why you do it.

Let me tell you, once you get this in your toolkit, it will be a regular, you'll love it. do it, sometimes I do just a five minute bounce on my rebounder and then do this as well because rebounders help with the lymph movement too. And then the next area is in the hip crease. We get a ton, we have a ton of lymph nodes here and we're always sitting and there's all this compression. So how we work the hip joint or the hip crease area, the groin, we can either do a little karate chop sort of in the groin

right down in the front crease of the hips or we sweep and when we sweep again we start high to low high to low because we're always trying to clear what's more close and then work further away

So I'm sweeping my hands now from the lower belly, down the front of the hips, towards the groin, and you just continue there, a sweeps up. This one might get a few looks at the sauna though, Lauren.

Lauren Bernick (18:45.441)
Yeah, well my sauna, it's like a, you do like a workout. There's usually, I'm usually the only one in there, because there's a bunch of them and they show like workout videos on the wall. So like you sign up to do hot yoga in one or whatever. So I'm usually by myself, yeah.

Dreena Burton (18:53.989)
nice! Okay. cool! Okay, that's cool.

Okay, so the final one is behind the knees. And so we bring our hands, you want to just prop your foot up on a chair or you can bend over. You can bend over or just put your foot on a chair and you bring your hands behind one knee. working my right knee first and I'm going to sweep from the base of the back of the lower leg up behind the knee towards the hamstring. So we start below the knee and sweep up. So you're right on the calf, the top part of the calf.

and you just want to get right behind the knee and sweep up, up from low to high, low to high. So it's about like 20 to 30 sweeps and then we'll switch the other leg.

low to high behind the kneecap and a lot of people as we go into the summer tend to get fluid right in the ankles being in the knees there's they get that heaviness in the lower legs so this is so good as as the temperatures get high and there's humidity and people are finding that in their body good and then finally we stop and we come back to our clavicle so hands back above

the clavicle sweeping and this is where we do the deep breathing. So we're just going to be aware of our breath. Sweeping on the clavicle, so it's starting from the outer shoulder towards the middle. Start from the top of the shoulder, come towards the middle. And you can change which hand is on top, just cross from the shoulder to the middle. And then we're going to breathe. And as you're breathing,

Lauren Bernick (20:24.451)
So her hands are crossed, her hands are crossed over each other. And then we're sweetly, loveable.

Dreena Burton (20:46.741)
A lot of us in our world are high chest breathers. So you may notice your breath is in your chest, but as you become aware of the breath, it starts to naturally become more full in the belly through the ribs and the back body. So as you're breathing now, just try to see if the breath can go into the rib cage. Deep breath into the low belly.

And another way to help that deep breath is to extend the exhale. So you might inhale and exhale, exhale, push out a little more on the exhale and then inhale, exhale, exhale, exhale, and then let your breath resume.

And may notice now it's a bit deeper, a little more full, more in the rib cage, more in the back body.

Lauren Bernick (21:54.765)
was good.

Dreena Burton (21:56.983)
How delicious, right?

Lauren Bernick (21:58.453)
It was good and it was fast. I like that.

Dreena Burton (22:00.893)
Mmm. Mmm. It's good. It's so good. You can work it into your day, you know, five minutes.

Lauren Bernick (22:07.723)
Yeah, and in the bath, like I love it bath too. So yeah, that's a good time to do it. Well, thank you, Terina. So I guess we'll see you in June and we'll talk about what are we gonna talk about in June?

Dreena Burton (22:11.649)
Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Dreena Burton (22:23.681)
the fire element. It's exciting. We have four organs. It's the only season that has four organs. And it's the season of joy and the heart. So it's a lot to talk about. It's very exciting. Yeah.

Lauren Bernick (22:36.779)
that's good. And again, this is all based on Chinese medicine and fascia. And so if you didn't hear episode 98, go back and listen to that one. So you'll be all up to speed. Well, thank you. And until next time, care, dreamers. Bye.

Dreena Burton (22:51.274)
Okay, this is back to you. Thanks, Lauren.