The Face Beyond Beauty with Shelly Marshall

What is your face communicating beyond what you see in the mirror?

In this episode, Ailey sits down with Shelly Marshall, founder of Beauty Shamans and Skin Within Studio, to explore the relationship between beauty, embodiment, and the nervous system. After years working as an aesthetician, registered nurse, and nurse injector, Shelly shares why she ultimately chose to step away from injectables.

Together, they unpack how Botox and fillers may influence more than appearance, discussing facial movement, lymphatic flow, inflammation, and the role our expressions play in connection and co regulation. The conversation also explores the growing pressure on women to maintain a youthful appearance and what can be lost when beauty becomes disconnected from the body's natural intelligence.

Rather than focusing on quick fixes, Ailey and Shelly offer gentle alternatives that support the face and nervous system, including facial massage, gua sha, fascia care, and lymphatic drainage.

If you have ever questioned your relationship with beauty or wondered how cosmetic treatments may influence your connection to yourself and others, this conversation offers a thoughtful and empowering perspective.

In this episode:

• 0:00 Welcome And Why Faces Matter
• 8:14 From Aesthetician To Registered Nurse
• 18:45 Botox And Autoimmune Concerns
• 27:28 Facial Mimicry And Co-Regulation
• 32:31 Fillers Explained And Hidden Risks
• 42:45 Beauty As A Class Signifier
• 48:20 Lymph As The Body’s Caretaker
• 52:32 Nightly Rituals Using Touch And Sound

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Transcript

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Welcome And Why Faces Matter

Ailey Jolie 0:49

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the pulpit power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life away from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the Podcast with me, Alay Sholy. My guest today is Shelly Marshall. Shelly is the founder of Beauty Shamans and the Skin Within Studio. And her path into her offering today hasn't necessarily been a straight line. She began her role as an aesthetician, drawn into skincare by the need to heal her own skin, and then she went into formal training, which left her with more questions than answers, eventually, even becoming a registered nurse so that she could truly understand both the body and the skin that holds it together. During this time, she became involved in the world of cosmetic injecting, where she spent years as a nurse injector. And then at the height of that work, with the industry growing fast all around her, she decided to walk away from it. What she walked into was the realm of facial massage, face yoga, reflexology, gua, and lymphatic drainage. And those are all of the things that we're going to spend time exploring together today. Through our conversation, we move through her professional history and some of her personal perspectives, but we also explore the moment she decided to stop injecting and what it cost her to step away from something just as it was becoming normal or trendy or popularized. We explore together what the face is quietly telling us about the nervous system and what happens relationally between two people when one face can no longer fully move. We also explore the lymphatic system and why Shelly thinks of it as the body's quiet caretaker. We also get a little bit of wisdom from Shelly as she names the practices she returns to every night, touch and sound as a way of coming back into herself. We talk about beauty and class and what it actually asks of a woman to choose her own face in a culture that keeps convincing her to buy another. Before we begin this episode, I want to name the way that Shelly came into my life. When I was first diagnosed with what we thought was a benign tumor in my jaw, it was a malleofascial surgeon, a man who injects and sculpts faces for a living and does a ton of other amazing things. And he was the man who told me to put my hands on my own face. After I had surgery, he was very explicit that I needed to touch my face, that I needed to go get massage, that I needed to do lymphatic drainage, and that I really needed to put focused awareness on the places where I had had jaw surgery as a way of getting the nerves to come back. Because there was a period where I couldn't feel my face and my lips because of surgery and the nerves being damaged. And because of his wisdom, I started going to have people touch my face, but also really invested in learning how to touch my own face and knowing the pieces that I already did at that time around the nervous system and our facial nerves and the relationship between those two things. I was really surprised, I would say, to feel the benefits of having a practice of being in physical contact with the face and what that does to the nervous system. And so my own interest and my own journey around having this benign tumor in my face and jaw surgery and nerve damage is how I came to Shelly. I hope in this conversation that you genuinely learn a few new things about your face and the nervous system, but also I truly hope that you leave this conversation with more information and more wisdom so that you can make informed decisions around whatever you decide to do with your body. I am someone who has engaged in plastic surgery. I've been very open about that and my relationship to what that has looked like in my life. I'm also someone who's been very transparent about engaging in Botox and fillers. There's absolutely no judgment from me if you are engaging in aesthetic alteration or thinking about it. This episode is truly here to just provide you information that is often gate capped or just not shared openly. I really hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body, the podcast with me, Ely Shelley. And I would love to hear from you what does being in your body mean to you?

Shelly Marshall 5:58

What does being in my body mean to me? Well, for me, it means observing what is going on and sitting with that and allowing yourself to sit with that. Because if you don't, and if you ignore it and if you try to push it away or push it down, it will grow. Okay. Things and you know, for me, I mean, emotions that come up, if I'm if I'm not addressing them or processing them in some way and they're very strong and they're affecting me, it's kind of like interest. It just keeps growing and growing until you pay it off. And, you know, so for me, being in my body is really observing those emotions and those feelings, the triggers that they, you know, different things they trigger in my body, and then paying attention to that and bringing awareness to that, and then working through that as much as possible. Um, just sitting with it until I can understand it fully and have some reflection on it. And in that way, I can kind of feel when my heart rate goes up. I can feel when my stress levels are calming down, I can feel when my forehead and my shoulders start to relax too. So to me, that's really what being in the body is, is to just sit with it, sit with whatever's coming up and don't try to push it down.

Ailey Jolie 7:31

I would love for the listener who's new to you, for you, if you feel open to it, sharing some of your journey working as an aesthetician and then moving into being a nurse and how you've kind of found yourself at the unique place that you're in right now.

Shelly Marshall 7:45

Yeah, it it was a journey for sure. You know, starting out in skincare, it was all about healing my own skin. So I learned a lot about skincare in the formal aesthetic training, but I there were a lot of things I didn't learn. And so I went through, you know, the aesthetic training, I learned everything about skincare, and then I wanted to advance and felt like I needed to know more because I didn't have all the answers yet. So then I became a nurse and I said,

From Aesthetician To Registered Nurse

Shelly Marshall 8:14

well, this will give me more answers. It'll give me more education, I'll learn more about the human body, I'll learn more about the skin. And in doing that, it opened me up to a whole new world. I started learning a lot more about consciousness, about energy, and not through nursing. This was all sort of like a byproduct because as I was going through nursing school and learning everything, I just knew there was a different way. I knew that the protocols and the formulas and the dogma that we were being fed every day, it just wasn't the answer. So I had this, you know, opposing sort of paradigm in my mind. And then I was slowly starting to say, okay, but there's a different, there's a different way, there's another side of this. And so I started exploring the other side sort of simultaneously. And then that kind of led me to learning a little bit more about what lies beneath the skin. And it wasn't just about skincare anymore, it was about the health of the tissue and what feeds the tissue and how to keep the tissue healthy. And then that's when I started learning about, you know, facial massage and uh face yoga, all the while I should back up, before I even got into the facial massage and face yoga, I had dabbled with injections and I was injecting as a nurse too. And I would say the common theme that I found working in the hospital and doing injections is that when you go to a hospital, because I worked in a hospital for a couple of years as a you know, floor nurse, when you go to a hospital, you're not there to heal. They are there to fix you because there's an acute problem. And thank goodness that that medicine exists. We need it. But that's why you go to a hospital. You're going there to get fixed for something that is broken, but there is no healing going on. You don't leave as a more whole person necessarily. You leave with a giant band-aid, essentially. And when I got into the injection world, I noticed basically the same thing that you get these injections and they are a quick fix. They are a band-aid to you know soothe what is bothering you. But there's nothing healing you if you don't bring in some of these other modalities or techniques or just ways of thinking about your health. If you neglect that, then you will you will constantly be going back for this quick fix and it's it's never gonna leave you happy. You're never going to be at peace until you do the internal work. And so that has all led me to sort of bring all that together in a very unique way. You know, I have a skincare line that's all based on seaweed and seawater, which is, you know, this ancient magical universal fluid that heals our bodies. We are our blood plasma is 98% identical with seawater. So, you know, when our when we interact with it, our body knows what to do with that and it creates healthier skin. And then at the same time, you know, I work with a lot of women who are either trying to avoid injections or they're coming off of injections. And because I have that sort of background knowledge of how the face works, the anatomy, the muscles, and how we can, you know, make the face appear to be healthier and more vibrant and more alive, we can also sort of deconstruct that and use some of these holistic modalities to achieve something very similar. And so that's where the rituals come in. And so now I have, you know, a platform with facial rituals where people can kind of go with me: facial massage, face yoga, lymphatic drainage, fascia work, all of these things that help to improve our tissue. But also at the same time, because we are having those intimate moments with ourselves, spending time with ourselves, it doesn't just transform your external skin and your face. It's doing something that's a lot deeper at the same time. And so I think that's really the beauty of how it has all come together.

Ailey Jolie 12:41

There are pieces, and I'm sure you know this, but when we offer self-touch, we stimulate uh not only our interoceptive, but our proprioceptive awareness. And the more that we do that, we strengthen that area of our brain, which then gives us more external awareness. So it's like there is so much neuroscience in the realm of self-touch, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to like make it out, which I I understand why. I want to back up and just spend some time exploring kind of the moment where you left leaving the injectable space and kind of some of the research that you were coming across or some of the information you were coming across, because I think it's very interesting. It's not a choice that I've heard a lot of. I've met more people who are like moving into injectables than people who are moving out of that space. And so yeah, I would love to just spend a little bit more time hearing about that specific moment for you and what kind of was leading that decision to be like, actually, I'm gonna step away from this, even when it's becoming more and more popular.

Shelly Marshall 13:39

Yeah, it ultimately it was not, it was not spiritually aligned with me. It ultimately just became this thing that it was hard for me to continue to inject into people's faces, knowing that they were gonna be back. They were still, they were becoming reliant on me. They were becoming dependent on me, someone outside of themselves to feel good and to feel beautiful. And as nice as that was as an ego boost in the beginning, it wasn't what was inligned with my purpose because I wanted to help people find peace in who they are. I wanted to help people feel beautiful from the inside out. And so the injection part of it was just this quick fix and ultimately, you know, no one is really healing. No one is, you know, the way I think about it a lot of times is the view from the top of a mountain is always going to be more fulfilling when you've actually climbed the mountain. And if you didn't, if you were helicoptered in, if you were, you know, planted on the top of the mountain, the view is going to still be beautiful, beautiful, but nothing inside has changed in you. Nothing has moved in you, nothing has been processed. And so because I want to, you know, my mission here on earth is to heal myself, to heal, you know, help other people heal themselves as well, and to help heal humanity and the planet, injections were just not aligned. And I and at the same time, they were growing. And we've seen that online. We've seen more people moving towards injections, they're moving towards all these procedures and plastic surgery and normalizing it. And that's fine. That's if if that is how you feel good, then that's the path that you can take. That's an option, of course. It's not the option that I want. And it's not that I'm better than anyone, it's not that people who get surgery is better than anyone. They're just different. They're different ways of communicating with ourselves. And I think that it's it all just comes down to what frequency you want to live on. And uh so the injection, you know, the other thing is you asked about the research. I didn't do a lot of research on it. It was really just a gut feeling. It was really just understanding in my body, in my heart, that this was not right for me because I was always gonna be chasing, because you know, I injected myself too. So I was always gonna be chasing that. And I was always gonna be obsessed with keeping my face frozen and perfect and always just chasing the next thing. And that's ultimately what happens when you go down that road is you start injecting and then you you're got you have to keep that up. And you also start noticing other things about your face that you want to fix. And then it's just where does it stop? Where does it end? It doesn't, it doesn't end. And I knew that that wasn't an answer for me. I knew that wasn't an answer for anyone else. And I did start to notice some research coming out about how fillers never fully leave the face. I was seeing research about how Botox can, you know, enter into, you know, systemically into our body and cause issues. And I didn't want to be part of that. I didn't want to be a part of that at all. I did not want that to be on my hands, that I could ever potentially harm someone. Because it never happened. I never harmed anyone when I was injecting, but the potential of it being there was always this pit in my stomach that I could potentially harm someone who's trying, you know, to go after vanity, essentially. It didn't, it seemed a little shallow to me. I didn't want to be a part of that. And I really wanted to focus on ways to help people feel empowered and to feel capable of healing themselves and ultimately to be at peace with life and who they are and their own unique beauty and help them find that.

Ailey Jolie 18:02

I know that you mentioned there, not going into the research so much, but I do have a sense that you already are like a wealth of knowledge in this area. So maybe it's not like as deep as your mind is telling you that you should go or could go. But I would love to just even spend some time speaking about Botox and the relationship between autoimmune conditions or how it can be, yes, a neurotoxin that's been put in the body for a very long time and has reached safety regulations in lots of spaces. And also it is different when you inject it in the face, which is so related to our cranial nerves that go to our nervous system. And there's a whole different um reaction that it can have in the body versus where it's maybe been injected in the past, which has been maybe more of a muscle relaxant. Um

Botox And Autoimmune Concerns

Ailey Jolie 18:45

tap my brain too far that way. But I would love to just kind of speak about that area because it's something in my practice that I've heard more and more of. It's definitely something living with an autoimmune condition myself. It was just like, oh, you just can't like do that anymore. Like that's just actually totally off the table and against all of the other things you're trying to do to heal your body right now. Like we just, that's just the choices made, your body has spoken, no more. And so I would love to just pull that piece apart because I don't think a lot of people have access to that information or even know that there are some like rough research links that we have started to put together in these ways.

Shelly Marshall 19:23

So yeah, I mean, if you are, you know, getting the Botox injections, we don't know what that does systemically. Um, if you want to go down, you know, to like the really localized um things that are happening when you get Botox done, you know, um, when you have something like an autoimmune disorder, there are a lot of things that can trigger that. Obviously, if your lymphatic system is not functioning properly, that's not going to help things very much. You want all of the systems in your body to be functioning optimally and working together synergistically. When you get Botox injections, and I wish that more people knew this. It's not just it's gonna freeze the muscle so that it's not moving and then you're not creating the wrinkles. When you get the Botox, like let's say the forehead, that's like the most popular area to get, it puts that muscle to sleep. It basically paralyzes it. And that cuts off lymphatic flow to that area. So something you might notice is heaviness, puffiness, under eye bags, because all of that lymph is being diverted from the forehead to other areas of the face. So essentially what that means is that your lymphatic system is not doing what it should normally be doing, it's not going to the areas where it normally should be nourishing and cleaning out and taking waste away. And that is something that I feel like if you're struggling with some sort of immune issue, autoimmune issue, you want all that waste to be eliminated and detox out of the body. So the more you are putting these substances like Botox into your body and paralyzing the muscles, you are cutting off the systems and how they function. And I can just see that absolutely having a trickle effect and contributing, you know, along with you know other unhealthy lifestyle factors to sort of an exacerbation of your body attacking itself.

Ailey Jolie 21:20

Why isn't everyone? And so I'd love to hear from you, and this could be just a simple answer of time or they don't have the knowledge or it's scary, but I am curious. They don't have the knowledge knowledge.

Shelly Marshall 21:30

Yeah. When you learn, so first of all, when you learn Botox, you do a weekend course or you get, you know, a master injector to come teach your office for a couple hours. And they're teaching you technique, they're teaching you placement, they're teaching you um serious side effects, uh, but they're not teaching you the little, the, the tiny things that affect your face and your body. They're not teaching you all of these things that require a little bit deeper research and how it can contribute to, you know, anxiety or how it can, you know, move uh, you know, or sort of reroute the lymph system. Like they're not talking about that. They're talking about like, do you have an allergy to a milk protein, you know, if you're using a certain type of Botox, because that could be deadly. You know, they're they're talking about do you have a history of like um, you know, uh myacin agravis or something, you know, like different things that are more serious, but you're they're not teaching about any of that stuff that your ENT was educating you on. That's like very nuanced. That's not normal at all. This was all all the stuff that I was starting to notice was just my personal experience with injecting people and noticing and and hearing. It, hearing from them and them reporting to me, I have puffiness under my eyes now, or now this side of my face moves differently. Or um and some things they couldn't even really put their finger on. It was just more of like I was noticing, like, oh, now you're obsessed with this, and now you're want to go down this rabbit hole and now you want to explore that. And where, girl, where when are you gonna stop? You know, I thought we fixed that, but really it doesn't fix anything. It it really doesn't fix anything. If you are not at peace with yourself, then you're you're always gonna criticize. You're if you don't have awareness of your face and who you are, you're always gonna look at yourself and think that there's something wrong. When someone looks in the mirror and they feel ugly, it's not necessarily because they're ugly, it's because they're disconnected with themselves. That's ultimately what it is. So, so when it comes to the injections and, you know, why do people not talk about this more? I think people are starting to talk about it more on social media, but like when you're talking about like the straight up, how do the reps teach the injectors? They don't teach them that at all. You know, it's like it's like the doctors, they don't learn nutrition in medical school. There are some doctors that do their own research and then they start, you know, making their practice all about that because that's not something that's taught at all.

Ailey Jolie 24:10

It just makes me so sad because I know how empowering that information was for myself. I remember even like as the Botox would start to wear off, I'd be like, oh, I feel my emotions differently. Like I feel myself differently, my anxiety is less. I can feel like the tingling sensation come back around my course and in my jaws. Like I felt more in me. So it's really sad to hear that that information is just like not making it pass. Are there other pieces of information before we switch into filler, which is a bit of a different topic, around Botox that you wish more people had?

Shelly Marshall 24:47

So another thing specifically for the forehead, um, the frontalis muscle, people will inject the frontalis muscle, believing that you know it's gonna get rid of the wrinkles forever and it's preventative. And while part of that is true, because it does prevent the muscles from moving, so you're no longer gonna be making those expressions. When you get enough Botox year after year, the muscle will continue to be paralyzed and weaken essentially. And so at some point it's going to catch up to you. At some point, when you stop doing the Botox, let's say you continue to do Botox for your forehead for 15 or 20 years, right? A couple times a year, your muscle will have weakened so much, it basically atrophies. And then you no longer really have function of that muscle, and it's going to start to sag. And so that's something that a lot of people, especially older clientele, like they see that that, you know, then their face basically like sags downward. And then they have droopy eyelids. And then how do you fix that? You go for the surgery. I mean, it's a whole, it's a cascade. I mean, we see that in the medical field too. Um, I forget the the proper term for that, like iotrogenesis or something. So it's something like that where you it just there's a cascade of symptoms. When you cover the symptom, you end up getting a new medication or an intervention for that. And then you need a new intervention or a new medication for that one to cover that, the symptoms of that. And it's just, it continues. So that's definitely something, you know, seeing the the atrophy there, the lymphatic drainage is definitely something. And I just think it takes, it takes you away from yourself. I think that I think that when you have these injections, you don't, you don't fully understand your emotions anymore, you know, like because you don't see them, you don't express them, you don't see them in the mirror. No one else sees them either. It changes your vibration, it changes your frequency on a whole, like on a very deep cellular level.

Ailey Jolie 26:45

This ties into the research I find most fascinating, the work on facial mimicry and what some people call the mirror neuron systems. We have researchers who've looked at what happens when the movement of the face is quieted. And what they find is that we mirror one another less. And the mirroring that would normally complete in the brain simply goes quiet. And they've been careful not to claim a straight line from that to anxiety. I want to be just as careful. But here's the question that stays with me. When the forehead can't move, what happens to our capacity to co-regulate, to feel our way into the person in front of us? Because that mirroring is how two nervous systems tune to each other. For me, realizing that people might not be able to fully read me or settle

Facial Mimicry And Co-Regulation

Ailey Jolie 27:28

alongside me was a huge turning point. I run anxious. I need to be able to connect. And so much of my work depends on someone having access to my nervous system in the room.

Shelly Marshall 27:38

Yeah, I don't know if I can speak super intelligently about the mirror neuron system because I haven't studied it. It sounds as in-depth as you have. It sounds like you have a lot more knowledge there. But it's absolutely true that, you know, our mirror neurons do help to regulate our nervous system, especially, you know, in communicating with children and helping them develop their nervous system and develop their, you know, language skills and their just overall awareness. Um, especially now that I have a two-year-old daughter, it's so important for me to be able to express my emotions for her because that's how she's learning how to express her emotions and how to understand other people's emotions. And I've already seen that, you know, when I'm upset about something or, you know, worried, like she gets it and will come and be like, mommy, it's okay. You know, like she knows because I have those facial expressions and we share that connection. Um, but I will say that, you know, our emotions are so important. They are, we need them to navigate our lives. A lot of people want to stuff anger down, a lot of people want to stuff stress down, but we need anger because it's we need to feel the anger, right? We need to feel that because if you don't feel it, and if you just push it aside, if you get rid of the, you know, expression that's like help helping you to feel that emotion, your anger is an indication of where your boundaries have been crossed, right? And stress is an indication uh that you're you've basically lost touch with reality, right? Because there's really nothing to be stressed about. And we need to have those indicators in our happening in our body, and we need to feel them and we need to notice them and observe them and process them because the body will find a way of expressing that. And so if you are not feeling that, and if you turn that off, you're it's it's going to catch up in your body at some point. It will either just live in there dormant and come out in some extreme, you know, possibly detrimental way, or it's going to come out in different ways, like the anxiety, like you know, the depression, like the maybe it can affect you in different ways, where you start developing, you know, some skin issues or weight issues or autoimmune issues or something. But the body wants to express that is what we do. Our emotions are how we communicate with humanity, with each other. And so we need to have those interactions and we need to be able to, you know, look at each other and understand. And I think people know this uh to a certain degree. I think, I think when COVID happened and everyone had to wear a mask, it was really hard. But thankfully, we still had the eyes to communicate. But I mean, it was difficult even for me to like empathize with people and really care about them when their whole face was covered. It just it created this barrier and this layer that you couldn't pass through. And so we become less connected as a species when that signaling has been turned off or literally been covered or frozen.

Ailey Jolie 31:03

There's so much I could add. And I'm very curious to see how Botox is framed in like 10, 20 years, if we'll be similar to how breast implants are. There's like a growing movement around breast implant illness. And I'm curious to see if there's like a if that starts to happen around Botox for many of the reasons that you've named, but also just the social component as well of what is it like to connect with someone who I can't read their emotions. Like I can't actually feel them in the room. There's an incongruence between affect and voice or affect and expression. It's like that is a very discombobulating experience for the human being. We we've evolved to know and to read each other in that way. And so this does tie into fillers because they can also change and alter expression. And so I would love to spend a little bit of time maybe picking apart some of the differences between Botox and fillers. They are very different, they interact with the face in a different way, they interact with the nervous system and lymph in a different way. And I think that there's probably maybe more growing awareness around fillers.

Shelly Marshall 32:07

Yeah, there's definitely more growing awareness about filler for sure. Um, there's it's less forgiving. Yeah, it's definitely less forgiving. So the difference between Botox and filler is um, you know, Botox will interacts with the muscles. It will paralyze the muscles so that it no longer creates movement in your face. Um, and then therefore, you know, you don't have the wrinkles popping up as much.

Fillers Explained And Hidden Risks

Shelly Marshall 32:31

Filler is what you use to fill areas of depression, a void where you've lost volume. So it's a hyaluronic acid substance, it's like a gel, and it is placed, so it's a foreign, it's a foreign thing, it's a foreign substance that is placed into your face strategically in certain areas of the face that then create that volume. Um, one thing I'll just, and this doesn't really have anything to do with it, but a lot of people think that filler lifts the face and it doesn't. That filler will never lift your face ever. It and that's ultimately, I mean, we are fighting against gravity. You know, all you know, that's what people are so worried about. Oh, my face is falling, let me go get filler. It's not gonna, that's not gonna help. People use the doctors and the um nurses who are injecting filler properly know this and they tell their patients this that filler is not gonna lift the face. We're just gonna fill areas where you have that, you know, volume loss. And it can definitely impair the lymphatic system. That I would say impairs the lymphatic system way more than even Botox. Because what can happen, first of all, is if the filler is injected incorrectly, and sometimes it's just an accident, it just happens. We have so many vessels in our face and in our body. But if the filler is injected into a vessel, it can basically occlude it, occlude the vessel, and lead to necrosis of the skin. This is a medical emergency. You need to go see, you know, depending on where that filler was placed, you may need to see an eye specialist to make sure you don't go blind. Uh, you definitely need to go back to your injector and get that dissolved as soon as possible. But even with those dissolving agents, it's not gonna get rid of it fully. So you may have to deal with your body, you know, trying to compensate for that loss of oxygen to the tissue and recreate new blood vessels to the area. It can take a long time. But even if it is placed in the correct position, your body still has to process it out. It's still a foreign substance. Your body's still gonna break it down eventually. It's gonna get rid of most of it over time, but it's not gonna get rid of all of it. All of it has to move through the lymphatic system. It needs to be detoxified out of the body. And if when it's you know, when it's not, and you're getting filler year after year, and depending on that to be your beauty routine to keep yourself looking youthful, you're gonna end up with what's called pillow face, which is where, and we've seen this on some celebrities. You know, you know exactly, you know, which ones, you know, once you see the face, you know it. And it looks like the injector did a horrible job. The injector didn't do a horrible job. The injector did exactly what they were supposed to do. It's the body compensating, it's the body trying to move all that stuff out and it can't. And so it accumulates, and then you end up with pillow face where the whole face is just super, super puffy and it just looks like it. I mean, it looks squishy, it looks inflamed. It doesn't, and you you end up looking unhealthy because of the pillow face.

Ailey Jolie 35:32

One thing that I found so fascinating was how much it does migrate and does move because I've had my filler, had an ultrasound forward and found it. And I again, I I feel like I'm a bit of a rare case. I ended up having um, it was originally diagnosed as a benign tumor in my jaw, and then they found it was a bone lesion. But because of where the the filler, how my face was atrophying and changing, the filler just like migrated and it was just like all hiding the change in my face that like should have been caught. And that again, for me was a moment where they uh they had to alter sound and dissolve before surgery and this piece, but that was a moment for me where I was like, oh my God, like we really don't know what this is doing. And also because I was engaging in this practice, I didn't notice that I was becoming unwell and that my body was developing this thing in my jaw. Like I missed all of the signs. Yes, it was sore, but I thought, well, that was because I had Botox, whatever, two months ago. That's a bit tender for that. I didn't cue. Oh my god, something's happening in my body and I'm missing it because I don't feel like is spoken about that much. So I would love to maybe even, and I think this goes into face yoga and some of those other things, like our face is communicating so much about our health, our well-being, our nervous system connects to others. So I would love to hear from you maybe even you can sh five things or four things, whatever it is, that you wish people knew about the role of the face and its importance in the rest of our body.

Shelly Marshall 37:02

When you're getting filler on the face, you are essentially masking anything else that's you know that's going on. The dark circles, you know, it can help to get rid of that if it's if it's placed correctly. If it's not placed correctly, it can be an absolute disaster. But that's a whole other story. Uh, you know, it's you're you're creating the illusion of health when you get fillers and when you get Botox together. The illusion of health is different than actually having your face be healthy. And so for me, that has been a really um uh such a blessing that I, you know, stepped away from the filler because now I can really understand like what's happening with my face. And because I have a little bit of background knowledge about the anatomy and the, you know, the health side of it and also the aesthetic side of it, uh, I can look at my face, I can look at actually pretty much anyone's face and kind of understand what's going on. Uh, you know, dark circles, that's like probably the, you know, one that a lot of people struggle with. It could be stemming from a lot of different things. But again, if you're, you know, getting under-eye filler and you don't see it, then you will miss those signs. You'll miss those cues completely. It can be overall stress in the body, it can be trauma, it can be uh your diet, it could be uh a lack of sleep, it could be a lot of different things that basically all come down to how are you living your life? How is your nervous system responding to life? That's essentially what it's saying. And so we when you cover that up, you're not gonna know that. And so you're not gonna be able to fix it, you're not gonna be able to address it. And it will just go unnoticed until it creates a problem somewhere else in your body. Um, another area of the face that uh people struggle with is like the jowling, for example. Now, people can get um you can get filler for the jawline. You can get Botox in certain areas that kind of help to lift certain areas of the face. Um, and then you can get, you know, surgery or threads to, you know, to lift uh the jawline. But when you start to see like a lot of jowling here, when you start to see a heavy jawline in general, that's an indication that your lymphatic system is not functioning properly. It's also an indication that your facial structure is starting to shift and starting to move. And when you see that without the filler, then to me, the light bulb goes off. Okay, this person doesn't have maxillary support. Their muscles are weak, so they need to work on strengthening the muscles of the face to not only create the scaffolding that then lifts the face, but also gives input to the muscles to maintain their bone density, to keep the bone structure and your facial framework stronger. And when that happens, that just goes away. Um, you know, also using your guasha tools and your lymphatic drainage practice to get rid of excess fluid and heaviness, that's also going to help to define this area too. And then just overall flexibility of the body. When your body's in a constricted state, everything is going to sort of become fibrotic. And when you have fibrotic dense tissue, it leads to sagging because that tissue is no longer active and functional. So uh, I mean, those are just two off the top of my head that I mean, I can see right away that people are trying to cover up and you know, it's it's not it's not gonna end well if they continue to do that. Oh, the lips. I saw this girl at the gym yesterday, and she had so much lip filler, and it just it it's not it's not only distracting, it didn't it wasn't in balance with her face at all. Her chin was still receding, right? So she had a recessed chin, but then she had these huge duck lips, and so it just looked off. Not only did this create a picture of not of not beauty, but it was also uh, you know, because it was so imbalanced, it doesn't look healthy. And, you know, the lips are supposed to, and the mouth is supposed to be an indication of how calm we are and how in touch we are with our you know sensual side and uh and just how you know relaxed and how we kind of you know interact with the world if we're you know in a calm state, if we're not super stressed, then our lips are and our mouth are going to be more relaxed. Um and so that's what she was trying to achieve, maybe, or maybe you know, something completely different, but it ends up just looking the opposite. Like it just, I mean, you're seeing the overcompensation right before your eyes, and it does not convey any of those natural signals and subconscious signals that we are supposed to feel when we look at someone's mouth and see that they are, you know, a very balanced uh uh individual.

Ailey Jolie 42:02

This ties in a little bit to there's two pieces, so actually I'll just let you choose. What you're sharing right now kind of ties into one piece that I often put with like put with the realm of class and how aesthetic treatments and Botox and filler can be a really strong class signifier. So if you have wealth, then it needs to be invisible. If you don't have wealth, then it needs to be shown so you can see that it's an access point. Um, so I we could explore that realm or the realm of lymph and what the heck is happening to your lymph because I know for myself when I got my breast implants out after 15 years, my face very slowly, like we're only on like we're not even months six yet. I'm getting that sharp jawline back, the high cheekbones, all

Beauty As A Class Signifier

Ailey Jolie 42:45

of the things that I had when I modeled that made me a successful model that I lost after I got my implants in. And I'm like, it's slowly coming back to that face that I knew I had. It's been a really interesting process. So we can go either one lymph or cough. I don't know.

Shelly Marshall 43:01

Okay, wait, what was the first one again?

Ailey Jolie 43:03

You said it was the the kind of the class signifiers of how these things are used to signify class in some ways and how it's actually quite dangerous for people who are without wealth to be going to injectors that maybe don't have training. I mean, they're not going to be the ENT that I saw on Hartley, like not Harley Street, but Chelsea in London. Like it's not exactly the same thing.

Shelly Marshall 43:24

Gosh, I don't know. We can go either way because both are so interesting to me. I mean, we can touch upon both. Um, I think that you're absolutely right that there's this sort of the way you get your face done does sort of put you in in a box, right? The best filler and Botox is is what goes unnoticed when no one knows that you have it. That is the best. That's the sign that your injector did a good job that you went to someone who is probably charging a lot because they know their worth and they know that they're good at it. Um, but I actually think that there are a lot of people who want the really big lips and the super frozen face. I first of all, I don't understand that at all, but I think it is sort of like there, they have this illusion that it will make them look more expensive, more classy because they have the money to spend on it, right? It's like saying, like, look how much money I have. Look at my lips. Like this, you know, like I like this is definitely too, these are definitely $2,000 lips. And I think it's kind of, you know, you can see that with like people's fashion too. You know, the the the millionaire in the room, in the in the, you know, like in a restaurant or at a bar or something. They're sitting there quietly. They're not wearing like super flashy designer stuff. And, you know, they're very quiet and they end up, you know, always giving like a you know 50% tip or something, right? And it's the people who don't have the money that want so badly to be in that room that they will have the fake lips, the frozen face, the makeup that's just, you know, over the top, the flashy designer stuff. And then they leave like a 5% tip. You know what I mean? Like, like it just, I don't know why the world works that way, but it does. And it's it's mind-boggling to me, the psychology behind that.

Ailey Jolie 45:20

I think what you're touching on there is the way that these practices have become like class signifiers in some ways, and how there are like two competing kind of aesthetics that are being used in them. It's like either kind of the clean girl aesthetic and you can't notice it's there, or I'm using Botox and filler and I want to signify.

Shelly Marshall 45:39

No. Yeah.

Ailey Jolie 45:39

No. Yeah. And it's like they're very competing. And it's like, oh my goodness, all of us are trapped in this system. And it's like, for me, I just find it very sad. It's like regardless of which one you're on, that the alternative or the option being presented to you is to inject something into your body. And I'm just like, I just don't think that that has to be that way for any of us.

Shelly Marshall 45:58

Well, thankfully, I think that people are starting to see that also. And it is starting to grow more online. And I am really excited to see that there are more people out there like me who are trying to promote, you know, this sort of movement towards holistic, regenerative, you know, aesthetics and using your face rather than working against it, right? You're using the muscles of your face to create the volume rather than injecting something and just ignoring your, you know, your facial muscles, putting in the work. Um I think that there is a movement happening and I'm so happy to see it. And I actually predict that in 10 or 20 years, we're gonna, this is going to be more mainstream because the injections and the surgery, you know, as we mentioned, it catches up to you. It's not sustainable. It is something that can be used as a tool, but it cannot be be the end all be all. People are getting facelifts and, you know, months, years down the line, they're unhappy with their facelift because it's failing, it's falling, right? Because they haven't put in the work. They haven't done anything to maintain that result. They haven't been working with their fascia to keep it flexible, they haven't been working with their muscles to maintain the lift of their facelift. They haven't been working with their lymphatic system to get rid of all the inflammation that happens after surgery, right? And so if you're not doing that, also, if you're not in, you know, if you're gonna go down that road of using injections and using plastic surgery, if you're not marrying the two, then you're you're wasting your money and you're not gonna be happy with the end result later on down the line.

Ailey Jolie 47:37

In your answer there, you touched on lymph. And so I would love to spend some time around the importance of moving the lymph.

Shelly Marshall 47:43

What is lymph and how does that change how our faces perceived or our lymphatic system can be seen as a surveillance and cleanup system of the body. So it observes what is happening, if there are foreign substances, if there are foreign invaders, and then it goes and cleans that up, essentially. A well-functioning immune system will do that. And it uses the lymphatic system to access those different points in the body. So where you have injury, where you have trauma, uh, where something has been injected, uh, where you have bacteria growing,

Lymph As The Body’s Caretaker

Shelly Marshall 48:20

your immune system will send little messengers for lack of a better term through your lymphatic system to go clean up that mess and then take all that waste back through certain lymphatic nodes that are strategically placed around the body to help with the detoxification process. So this has both a beauty aspect and like a health aspect. When your immune system is working functionally, you're gonna be ill less because your lymphatic system will then start to take all those, you know, viruses and bacteria and waste particles and detox them out of the body. So uh when you start to feel a cold coming on, work with your lymphatic system immediately because you will see that that cold will not linger as long when you've when you have a well-functioning lymphatic system. Um so you know, things like that or or surgical wounds, injury, stuff like that. Your lymphatic system will help to take care of that. You know, the inflammatory response happens, the lymphatic system goes there, it cleans everything up and it takes all the waste out so that that area can be healed. From a beauty perspective, it's kind of the same thing, but like on a, it's just like a a different, a different way of seeing it, a different way of viewing it. You have cortisol that's raising in your body all the time, right? If you're stressed, then you're gonna have increased cortisol, which creates more inflammation in your body. And we see a lot of that in the face. The face carries a lot of fluid stagnation. And so you work with your lymphatic system, it's essentially doing the same thing that it's doing for, you know, the, you know, the surgical injured the surgical incisions or the injuries that you had or the bacterial infection that you had. But this time it's it's doing it for the face and it's it's helping with those things. But in that process of moving out that waste and the fluid retention and the stagnation, it is also helping to firm the skin. It's helping to clear your complexion, it's helping to uh restrict or um uh it's helping to decompress all of your lymphatic vessels so that everything can move, you know, more functionally. It's helping to allow your muscles and your fascia to move more freely. And so you end up with a more lifted face, you end up with clearer, you know, less puffy eyes, you end up with less acne. Because you're getting rid of that inflammation, your collagen is not gonna be destroyed as quickly. So it has all these beauty uh benefits at the same time that it's actually helping to clean up your health. So I don't see why people wouldn't address their lymphatic system on a daily basis, even if it's just like a really simple, I'm gonna stimulate my lymph nodes, I'm just gonna jump around, I'm gonna stretch, I'm gonna just move my, you know, my hands or my dry brush or my gua shot or whatever you're using just to move it towards that direction, to just to facilitate your body to do what it knows how to do. And that's, you know, your your body wants to heal every day. And your lymphatic system is an integral part of how your body can heal. And so if you're just even just a little bit, your face, your body, jumping around, whatever, address your lymphatic system every single day. And you will not only have more energy, but your face is gonna look so much more uh light, it's gonna look so much more vibrant, and your body's gonna be healthier too, and you'll stay healthier, you won't get as sick as often.

Ailey Jolie 51:49

And how you just answered that last question may play into my last question for you today is what is one thing with all of your experience that you wish more people knew about when it comes to the relationship they have with their body or their face?

Shelly Marshall 52:05

What is one thing that I wish people knew more about? That is a good question because there's so many ways that we could answer this question. What is something I wish more people knew about? There are two techniques that I think could work for a lot of people. Number one, touching your face. Touching your face is through massage, through,

Nightly Rituals Using Touch And Sound

Shelly Marshall 52:32

you know, helping yourself through the face yoga poses, through lymphatic drainage massage. It adds this element of therapeutic touch that our hands are this conduit of energy from our own body. And so when we touch our faces intentionally, we are literally touching our face with, you know, with love, right? And that does something. When you've been like bottling up emotions, like you're really sad or angry or anxious about something, and it's just you're holding, holding, holding, and then you know, you're like, I'm gonna be strong, I'm gonna be strong, and then someone hugs you and it all comes out and you just can't control it because someone has hugged you, it's because you feel that intention, you feel the love that is infused with that person's touch. We as humans crave touch. We we do, we want that touch. And so if you're not gonna go, you know, get a facial from your facialist where they're gonna touch your face and you know you're totally zenned out and able to let your nervous system heal, you can do it yourself. You can touch your face in very loving ways once you learn how to do it. You can start to understand where you're carrying stress just by touching your face. You can start to understand maybe subconsciously where some of those emotions live because you're just bringing that awareness and presence into the practice. Um it can just really it does something on a very, very deep level when you touch your face. The other thing that I have practiced a lot recently, I would say in the last few years, is integrating sound with touch. So while I'm doing my facial rituals and I'm sort of, you know, processing the day and I'm processing my thoughts and my emotions, and I'm feeling where there's stress, I'm feeling where there's tension, I'm asking myself where that tension might be coming from, and I'm exploring rather than criticizing all while touching my face. I have sound on in the back. And the sound has a certain vibration, a certain frequency, and we are what like 70% water, and sound waves move through water, it carries information and has this ability to affect the molecules of water. So you have this sound on at the same time that you are touching your face, and you, I mean, it immediately brings you into your body. You there's no escape, like it takes you directly into your body and you feel things coming up. And sound has a way of bringing up some of those emotions, depending on the frequency, the pitch, and you know, the melody and all that. It can bring these things up to the surface where you can then address them and process them and basically let go. And you know, you can you can lighten your lighten your body, you can lighten your load and just become a lighter version of yourself through those simple practices that bring you into your body. I mean, that's ultimately, you know, that's that's the goal, right? You want to be at peace with who you are, you want to you want to feel radiant from the inside out. And I think that those two things can make a huge difference. And it doesn't have to be a long time, it could be for 15, 20 minutes, but you make that a ritual every night and your nervous system starts to anticipate it, it starts to expect it. And then pretty soon in your everyday life, it becomes a part of who you are, and so it becomes just easy to get to that space again anytime you need.

Ailey Jolie 56:24

Thank you so much for our time together today, but all that you share and the way that you're changing kind of the currents. I maybe uh wish that I had said this at the start of our time together, but I actually was introduced kind of inadvertently to you when I found out I had my benign tumor in my jaw. My malleofascial surgeon was like the best. He's like, I could keep injecting for the pain. He's like, or you could touch your face every day, 30 minutes several times a day, and you just sit and you touch it. It's gonna bring back the nerves because I had lost nerve sensation after surgery. It's gonna break like the nerves, it's gonna change this. He just like went through all the effects and he's like, go do face yoga. And anyway, so I went to look for face yoga and I found you. So it was like through this pathway of this like man that you would never expect as a malleofascial surgeon. He's doing Botox injections and jaw sculpting and all the things. He was the one who was like, This is actually what you need to do if you want these results. This is what will change your face. Putting your hands on your face, touching it every day, going and getting fun facials. Like these were his words. And anyways, they led me to you. And I've just absolutely enjoyed everything that you shared and how you're challenging things and the compassion that you bring. And there's not, at least in how I perceive how you show up online, I don't pick up an error of judgment or this is the right way or the wrong way, or the way you should do it. Just like these are the options, and we're all living in a system with ageism, and like, where do you want to position yourself in that? And like, how do you want to, and which is something I deeply respect and admire. So thank you for your time today and all that you share.

Shelly Marshall 57:58

I really thank you so much. And it sounds like that surgeon you went to has he's he knows he's in the next. Yeah. Because they can be when you pair the two, it it's a powerful combination when you can be able to open your mind to the the paradox of those two um, you know, existing realities. So that's a good thing. Well, thank you so much for having me.

Ailey Jolie 58:27

I really want to be clear and compassionate because the last thing that I want is for you to listen to this episode and feel a sense of judgment or shame or blame. We all live inside a system that is constantly prioritizing youth with unrealistic expectations on the body, and we are all going to respond to those in different ways. I hope that this episode provided you a little bit of information on how the face moves, how it is a relational organ, how it allows us to feel things, how it allows us to connect to others. Then maybe that leads you to continue to do all of the aesthetic practices that you've been doing with new awareness. Wonderful, great. Or maybe it leads you to make another choice and to incorporate some of what Shelly teaches, some of her beauty routines of putting your hands on your face or moving your limph or letting sound travel through you or restoring sensation through touch. I am definitely not in a voice of authority on what you should or should not do with your body. I definitely know that Shelly doesn't present herself to be one either. So I hope that in this episode that you found something tender for you to consider and to be curious about. And this may even be lessening your judgment towards individuals who do engage within these practices, lessening some self-judgment, maybe it's just feeling more aware. Again, thank you for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guests, and me, Aile Jalid, to be a part of the process of coming home to your body. If this conversation sparks something in you, I would love for you to keep going with me. My 14-week guided program, Embody, is for women who are ready to return to the wisdom already living in their bodies. And you can find it at embodymethod.com. And if you want to stay close to my writing, my reflections, the research I'm working through, and whatever is coming next, you can find me at ailejolie.substack.com. Lastly, if you want to spend time in person together, I will be hosting a retreat in Nasara in Costa Rica this November. You can find out more at Imbodymethod.com/slash retreat. I'd love to spend time with you in person. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship that you have with your parents with the body.